Stars on Diet: Weight Is Limited to 150 Suns, Researchers Find

NY Times: "SHINGTON, March 9 - The universe is full of stars, but there appear to be few really fat ones. Astronomers said Wednesday that there seemed to be a stellar weight limit equivalent to 150 Suns, but no bigger. Using the Hubble Space Telescope to examine one of the densest clusters of stars in the Milky Way, which should have been brimming with fat stars, astronomers said they found a sharp cutoff in the mass of bodies that form in this stellar nursery. In examining hundreds of stars in the dense Arches cluster, Dr. Donald F. Figer and colleagues at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore said they could not find any larger than 130 solar masses, or equal to the mass of 130 of our Suns. 'We are surprised at this result because we expected to find stars up to 500 to 1,000 times more massive than our Sun,' Dr. Figer said."