OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT: NEW FINDING IN ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS RESEARCH

 UM

 A team of researchers from the Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, University of Malaya (UM), recorded an outstanding achievement when their collaborative research with the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom and universities in Germany discovered a new finding in astronomy and astrophysics research.

        The research has discovered the most massive stars to date, weighing more than 300 times the mass of the Sun at birth, or twice as much as the currently accepted limit of 150 solar masses.

        The team is composed of Paul A. Crowther, Richard J. Parker, and Simon P. Goodwin (University of Sheffield, UK), Olivier Schnurr (University of Sheffield and Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam, Germany), Raphael Hirschi (Keele University, UK), as well as Norhasliza Yusof and Associate Professor Dr. Hasan Abu Kassim (University of Malaya, Malaysia).
        A press release on this new discovery was issued by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) on July 21, 2010, and it was reported by Science News, BBC and the Discovery Channel.