The Wolf-Rayet star Mk 34 was observed more than 50 times as part of the deep T-ReX Chandra ACIS-I X-ray imaging survey of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud conducted between 2014 May and 2016 January .
Its brightness showed one bright maximum and repeated faint minima which help define an X-ray recurrence time of 155.1 \pm 0.1 days that is probably the orbital period of an eccentric binary system .
The maximum immediately precedes the minimum in the folded X-ray light curve as confirmed by new Swift XRT observations .
Notwithstanding its extreme median luminosity of 1.2 \times 10 ^ { 35 } \mathrm { erg } ~ { } \mathrm { s } ^ { -1 } , which makes it over an order of magnitude brighter than comparable stars in the Milky Way , Mk 34 is almost certainly a colliding-wind binary system .
Its spectrum shows phase-related changes of luminosity and absorption that are probably related to the orbital dynamics of two of the most massive stars known .