It's not easy to weigh a star, but an international team of astronomers has done just that.
In fact, they've measured the masses of both stars in an odd binary star system some 25,000 light-years from Earth--and gauged the space-time warp resulting from the system's intense gravitation.
"Our result is important because weighing stars while they freely float through space is exceedingly difficult," Dr. Joeri van Leeuwen, a University of Amsterdam astrophysicist and the leader of the team, said in a written statement. "That is a problem because such mass measurements are required for precisely understanding gravity, the force that is intimately linked to the behavior of space and time on all scales in our universe.