A ‘DOWN-TO-EARTH’ dad from Huddersfield has made a discovery which is out of this world.

Astrophysicist Paul Crowther, from Kirkheaton, has discovered the biggest star in the universe – which at its birth was 320 times bigger than the sun.

Paul, 42, and his team spotted the R136a1 star at the edge of our galaxy shining 10 million times brighter than the sun.

The star is way beyond the size that scientists previously thought possible.

Former Greenhead College pupil Paul said: “Unlike humans, these stars are born heavy and lose weight as they age.

“R136a1 is already middle-aged and has undergone an intense weight loss program.”

Paul, a professor at the University of Sheffield, said the giant was identified at the centre of a star cluster in the Tarantula Nebula – a sprawling cloud of gas and dust in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy about 165,000 light-years away from the Milky Way.

Father-of-one Paul and his team identified a range of giant stars in the cluster, with the R136a1 being the largest.

The former King James’s School pupil said: “The biggest live only three million years – in astronomy that’s a very short time.”

Because of the relatively small life spans of the stars they are very hard to find and astronomers only have a limited range to observe them.

In clusters of stars which are very far away scientists find it hard to tell if what they are seeing is one or two stars.

To find the mass of the ‘monster’ star, Paul and his team re-examined previously known stars to see if they could find an accurate measurement of their weight.

They then reviewed archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope and gathered new readings from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope at Paranal in Chile.

Paul’s dad Donald Crowther told the Examiner when he found out about the discovery he asked Paul if he’d be naming the star ‘The Crowther Star’.

The proud 74-year-old said: “But it ended just being called after a lot of numbers and letters.”

The former St John Fisher High School teacher said: “I’m not sure where he gets his intelligence from, me or his mum Doreen, but his son Billy is clever and takes after his dad.

“All his life he’s only been interested in maths and when he was younger he was quite interested in building models – he became interested in astrology later.

“We couldn’t believe it when he told us.

“We’re very proud. He’s achieved so much already because he’s only 42.

“You think of professors as being a lot older.

“He was excited but not too excited because he’s a very down-to-earth kind of person.”