Astronomers have spotted the largest yellow star ever observed in our galaxy and 1300 times larger than the sun.
The yellow hypergiant star HR 5171 A is also in the top 10 of the largest stars known and about a million times brighter than the sun, Olivier Chesneau, whose team made the discovery, said Wednesday.
Despite it being nearly 12,000 light-years from earth, the object can just about be seen with the naked eye.
"The new observations also showed that this star has a very close binary partner, which was a real surprise," said Chesneau, of the Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur, in Nice, France.
"The two stars are so close that they touch and the whole system resembles a gigantic peanut."
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His team estimated the star would be 50 per cent larger than the famous red supergiant Betelgeuse.
Yellow hypergiants are very rare, with only a dozen or so known in our galaxy.
HR 5171 A had been getting bigger over the past 40 years, cooling as it grew, the astronomers said.
Chesneau and an international team used a Very Large Telescope Interferometer of the European Southern Observatory in Paranal, Chile.
A technique called interferometry combines light collected from multiple individual telescopes to effectively create a giant telescope up to 140 metres in size.
