Theorists have long wondered how massive stars--up to 120 times the mass of the Sun--can form without blowing away the clouds of gas and dust that feed their growth. But the problem turns out to be less mysterious than it once seemed.

Scientists may have solved one of the most longstanding astrophysical mysteries of all times: How massive stars – up to 120 times the mass of our sun – form without blowing away the clouds of gas and dust that feed their growth.

Two of our Galaxy's most massive stars have been scrutinised in an impressive view by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. They have, until recently, been shrouded in mystery, but the new image shows them in greater detail than ever before.

Theoretical models of stellar formation propose the existence of very massive stars that can attain up to 150 times the mass of our Sun.

One of the most powerful eruptions in the universe might have spun an infrared ring around a rare and exotic star known as a magnetar, a highly magnetized neutron star and the remnant of a brilliant supernova explosion signaling the death throes of a massive star.

Using two NASA satellites, astronomers have discovered the heftiest known black hole to orbit a star. The new black hole, with a mass 24 to 33 times that of our Sun, is more massive than scientists expected for a black hole that formed from a dying star.

Discovery of the largest example of a “small” black hole — one formed from the collapse of a single massive star at the end of its lifetime — has led scientists to revaluate of how black holes come into being, according to a report in Nature.

Astronomers have located an exceptionally massive black hole in orbit around a huge companion star. This result has intriguing implications for the evolution and ultimate fate of massive stars.

MIT astronomers played a key role in discovering what NASA calls one of the most bizarre objects in space: a star "skeleton" of very low mass that is orbiting and being slowly consumed by a pulsar, or remains of a second massive star, that is itself spinning faster than a kitchen blender.

The brightest stellar explosion ever recorded may be a long-sought new type of supernova, according to observations by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based optical telescopes. This discovery indicates that violent explosions of extremely massive stars were relatively common in the early universe, and that a similar explosion may be ready to go off in our own Galaxy.

Astronomers using data from several X-ray satellites have caught a magnetar - the remnant of a massive star with an incredibly strong magnetic field - in a sort of giant cosmic blench.