- 3696 - STARS - largest to the smallest? From our perspective, the sun looks massive. However, if you zoom out to the far reaches of our galaxy, the sun no longer looks like such a giant. As far as stars go, our sun dwarfs the rest of the stars in the sky. But if you zoom out to the far reaches of our galaxy, the sun no longer looks like such a giant. In fact, it's an average in size star.
---------------------------- 3696 - STARS - largest to the smallest?
- What is the largest known star in the universe? The answer depends on whether you're talking about mass or the total volume of a star. The heaviest stars are often unremarkable when it comes to physical size, and the most voluminous stars are often lightweights. That's because as stars get older, they tend to expand and shed mass.
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- The record holder for largest mass is the star “R136a1“. It's located about 160,000 light-years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy that orbits the Milky Way. In diameter, this star is 30 to 40 times the size of our sun, that is more than 200 times more massive. This star is also relatively young, 1 million years old compared with our sun's 4.5 billion years.
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- If the biggest star in the universe is the one with the largest diameter, there are a number of contenders. At the top of that list is “UY Scuti“. This red hypergiant's diameter is roughly 1,700 times that of the sun.
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- If the sun were a cherry, UY Scuti would be a 10-story-high sphere. But there's a lot of uncertainty in determining the diameter of very distant stars. UY Scuti is about 9,500 lightyears from Earth.
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- Scientists need to know how much light the star produces, a figure due to the fact that stars appear dimmer with distance and brighter close up. Add that to the fact that red hypergiants like UY Scuti are often "variable," meaning their brightness flickers and flares over time.
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- Other similarly large stars include “WOH G64“, another red supergiant less than 5 million years of age. Both located in the Large Magellanic Cloud “VY Canis Majoris” about 8.2 million years old both of which have diameters around 1,500 times that of the sun.
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- If any of these stars replaced our sun at the center of our solar system, they would envelop every inner planet up to and including Jupiter. The Earth, all the inner planets would be vaporized.
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- But while our sun may not be the biggest star in the universe, it's certainly not the smallest. It is medium size. The smallest known star is “EBLM J0555-57Ab“. It is smaller than the planet Saturn and still receives its star designation. At any lower mass, it wouldn't be able to sustain nuclear fusion at its core, and would instead be classified as a “brown dwarf“, a failed star.
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- The universe is vast and these stars are just the ones that lie in our immediate neighborhood. We can't measure the size of stars at the other side of the Milky Way, much less the far reaches of the universe. There's too much dust, there's too much interference with light. And while UY Scuti and EBLM J0555-57Ab approach the upper and lower limits of a star's possible size, we still have no idea how massive, or heavy, stars can get.
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September 27, 2022 STARS - largest to the smallest? 3696
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