What is the brightest star in Earth's sky? Anyone? Wait, do you hear this? Rightness is the measurement of the luminous flux from a light source, and this tells us how much light is being radiated by a particular light source. And astronomers refer to the magnitude of a star or planet, and this is how star gays or determine how bright an object appears in the night sky by the apparent magnitude. The concept of magnitude is relatively easy to grasp. Put simply, the lower the magnitude of a star or object, the brighter it appears in the sky. For instance, the star serious, the brightest star of the nighttime sky, has an apparent magnitude of minus 1.44, with the brightest object in the overall sky having an apparent magnitude of minus 26.74. But does anyone know what the object is staring at us all the time? The sun, of course, but in the night sky, there is a star that has brightness more than 10 million times the brightness as our home star. The so-called pistol star is the brightest star, but we can't see it because of the interstellar dust. Located approximately 25,000 light years from Earth in the direction of Sagittarius. This thing is so bright that it would be visible to the naked eye as a fourth magnitude star if it were not for the interstellar dust that completely hides it from view in visible light, and only discovered in 1990 after the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. The largest known star in the observable universe as viewed from the direction of planet Earth is called the pistol star, and it is believed to be more than 100 times as massive as the sun, and 10 million times as bright. The pistol star is a blue hyper-giant star, one of the most luminous known stars ever discovered or observed by Earthlings. It is one of the many massive young stars in the quintuplic cluster in the Galactic Center region, which owes its name to the shape of the pistol nebula, which it illuminates. In 1990, the pistol star was known to lie at the center of the pistol nebula in the Milky Way galaxy, and in 1995, it was suggested that the pistol star was so massive, it was throwing off the mass that actually created the nebula that surrounds it. With further observations from the Hubble Space Telescope in 1997, confirming the relationship between the star and the nebula. Astronomers are currently unsure how a star this massive could have formed, or how it will act in the future proving a limited knowledge of the known universe that we are only now beginning to peer into and understand. Appearing as a bright white dot, astronomers are confounded with this monster as Hubble operators have for years now attempted to understand this anomaly in the Milky Way galaxy, with Hubble's near infrared camera and multi-object spectrometer needed to take the pictures, the star is hidden at the Galactic Center behind thick layers of obscuring dust. Hubble's infrared vision penetrated the dust to reveal the star, which is glowing with the radiance of 10 million suns, and the original captured image also showing one of the most massive stellar eruptions ever seen in space. The radiant star has enough raw power to blow off two expanding shells, magenta of gas, equal to the mass of several of our suns, with the larger shell so big and eye-watering for light years that it would stretch nearly all the way from our sun to the next nearest star, Alpha Centauri A. The outburst seen by Hubble are estimated to be only 4,000 and 6,000 years old, and despite such a tremendous mass loss, astronomers estimate that the extraordinary star may currently be over 100 times more massive than our sun, and may have started with as much as 200 solar masses of material, but has recently been violently shedding much of its vast mass, which only formed about 3 million years ago, a cosmic hiccup in space-life sagas, but its true age, of course, is completely unknown. The non-figure of UCLA was present at a NASA press conference in 1997, and said on the discovery that this star may have been more massive than any other star, and now it is without question still among the most massive even at the low end of our estimates. Its formation and life stages will provide important tests for new theories about star birth and evolution. Figure proposed in his PhD thesis that the past eruptive stages of the star might have created the nebula, the Hubble Spectrometer results confirms this conclusion. The astronomers believe that the pistol nebula was created by eruptions in the outer layer of the star, which ejected up to 10 solar masses of material in giant outbursts about 4,000 and 6,000 years ago. The star will continue to lose more material, eventually revealing its bare hot core, sizzling at 100,000 degrees. Burning at such a dramatic rate, the pistol star is destined for certain death in a brilliant supernova in about a million years from now. Massive stars are burning their candles at both ends. They are so luminous that they consume their fuel at an outrageous rate. Burning out quickly and often creating dramatic events such as exploding as supernova. Mark Morris, a UCLA professor of astronomy and co-investigator, said that as these stars evolve, they can eject substantial portions of their atmosphere. In the case of the pistol star, producing the nebula and an extreme stellar wind outflow of charged particles, that is 10 billion times stronger than that of our sons. The pistol star was so massive when it was born that it brings into question current thinking about how stars are formed. Our Milky Way is a dusty place. So dusty in fact that we cannot see the center of the galaxy in visible light. That is why we peer into these obscure views in the infrared spectrum, allowing us to see the things we were apparently never meant to see from the ground of Earth, but what do you guys think about this one anyway? Comments below and as always, thank you for watching.