He also identified the Pistol Star as one of the most massive in the Universe.

Pistol Star (once thought to be the most luminous star in the galaxy)

Besides the Pistol Star, several other objects have been cited as the "most luminous star" in recent years.

The Pistol Star was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in the early 1990s.

Astronomers said the shape of the nebula reminded them of a pistol, and named its source the Pistol Star.

Some theorists had doubted that material for a star on the massive scale of the Pistol Star could coalesce without blowing itself apart.

The brightest star known until now is one called the Pistol Star, five million to six million times as bright as the Sun.

The Pistol Nebula surrounds one of the most massive stars known, the Pistol Star.

The Pistol Star is possibly as much as 150 times more massive than the Sun, and is about 1.7 million times more luminous.

The Pistol Star is a blue hypergiant and is one of the most luminous known stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.

Scientists can come even closer to achieving this effect using a technique Dr. McLean calls color translation (which, for technical reasons, wasn't possible with the Pistol Star).

(Caveat: Since examples such as the Pistol Star have been demoted by improved data, one should be skeptical of most available lists of "most massive stars."

Dr. Figer and Dr. Morris said the Pistol Star was so massive when it was born that it brought into question current thinking about how stars were formed.

The most evolved stars are barely edging away from the main sequence while the Quintuplet Cluster includes a number of hot supergiants as well as a red supergiant and the Luminous Blue Variable The Pistol Star.

Color Coding The Pistol Star (so called because of the shape of a gaseous nebula surrounding it) burns with the brightness of 10 million Suns and is so large that it would fill the entire space inside Earth's orbit.

Although it does not contain quite such luminous or massive stars as the nearby Arches cluster, it does have the distinction of hosting two of the extremely rare luminous blue variables, the Pistol star and the less well-known FMM 362, and a third just a few parsecs away.