Pistol Star

Diameter: 470 million km

The Pistol Star is a luminous blue variable star that lies near the Milky Way's hot and violent, but metal-rich galactic center, deep within its central bulge. It is an extemely luminous and massive star at the center of the Pistol Nebula. Larger than a solar system, it radiates as much as more than 10 million times more light than a yellow main sequence star. The star is so massive the entire mass of the Pistol Nebula is in fact ejecta originating from the star. It is one of the brightest stars in the entire Milky Way galaxy.

Based on proximity and age, the Pistol Star appears to be a member of the four-million-year-old Quintuplet Cluster located only about around 6.5 light-years (ly) -- two parsecs -- away from it. The Quintuplet contains a number of smaller but similarly hot stars that are also throwing off tremendous quantities of mass and ionizing the surrounding gas. Also located near the Pistol Star and Nebula is the two-million-years-old, compact Arches Cluster which contains as many as 150 O-type stars alone.

The star has blown off two expanding shells of gas; the largest shell is four light-years (ly) wide. The two gas shells are estimated to be only 4,000 and 6,000 years old, respectively. When the Pistol Star finally stops blowing off mass, it may be reduced to less than ten times the size of a standard main sequence star.

Future

The Pistol Star may only be around 1.7 to 2.1 million years old but will explode in a supernovae within only another one to three million years.

Given the apparent youth of the Pistol Star, it is likely that any protoplanetary bodies that may have formed around the star are still agglomerating other planetesimals. In any case, any developing carbon-based life on a developing planet would be subject to tremendous heat on a newly formed planet that is under intense asteroidal and cometary bombardment, in addition to the intense and deadly radiation produced by nearby supernovae and other massive young stars.