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Below are lists of the largest stars currently known, ordered by radius and separated into categories by galaxy. The unit of measurement used is the radius of the Sun (approximately 695,700 km; 432,300 mi). [1] The Sun, the orbit of Earth, Jupiter, and Neptune, compared to four stars (Pistol Star, Rho Cassiopeiae, Betelgeuse, and VY Canis Majoris)
[3] [62] [65] The star is very unstable, having a prodigious mass loss such as in ejections. VY Canis Majoris is a candidate for a star in a second red supergiant phase, but this is mostly speculative and unconfirmed. [66] From this star CO emission is coincident with the bright KI shell in its asymmetric nebula. The star will produce either:
This list only concerns "living" stars – those which are still seen by Earth-based observers existing as active stars: Still engaged in interior nuclear fusion that generates heat and light. That is, the light now arriving at the Earth as images of the stars listed still shows them to internally generate new energy as of the time (in the ...
UY Scuti was analyzed to be the largest and the most luminous of the three stars measured, at 1,708 ± 192 R ☉ (1.188 × 10 9 ± 134,000,000 km; 7.94 ± 0.89 AU) based on an angular diameter of 5.48 ± 0.10 mas and an assumed distance of 2.9 ± 0.317 kiloparsecs (kpc) (about 9,500 ± 1,030 light-years) which was originally derived in 1970 ...
WOH G64 (IRAS 04553-6825) is a symbiotic binary in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), roughly 160,000 light-years from Earth. The main component of this system was once recognized as the best candidate for the largest known star when it was a red supergiant, [7] until it gradually became a yellow hypergiant with half of its original size and 34% of its luminosity.
Mass loss is largest for high-luminosity stars with low surface gravity and enhanced levels of heavy elements in the photosphere. R136a1 loses 1.6 × 10 −4 M ☉ ( 3.21 × 10 18 kg/s ) per year, over a billion times more than the Sun loses, and is expected to have shed about 35 M ☉ since its formation.
Once considered as having the largest angular diameter of any star in the sky after the Sun, Betelgeuse lost that distinction in 1997 when a group of astronomers measured R Doradus with a diameter of 57.0 ± 0.5 mas, although R Doradus, being much closer to Earth at about 200 ly, has a linear diameter roughly one-third that of Betelgeuse. [140]
Messier 87 (also known as Virgo A or NGC 4486, generally abbreviated to M87) is a supergiant elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo that contains several trillion stars. One of the largest and most massive galaxies in the local universe, [b] it has a large population of globular clusters—about 15,000 compared with the 150–200 orbiting ...