Biggest Star Ever Found Is Ripping Apart

[Ichingcarpenter]

The largest star ever discovered may give scientists a better sense of how massive, dying stars seed the universe with the ingredients for rocky planets and even life.

W26 is about 1,500 times wider than the sun, making it the biggest known star in the universe. The red supergiant star is nearing the end of its life and will eventually explode as a supernova, researchers said.

"Stars with masses tens of times larger than that of the sun live very short and dramatic lives compared to their less massive siblings," officials with the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) in the U.K. said in a statement. "Some of the most massive stars have lifetimes of less than a few million years before they exhaust their nuclear fuel and explode as supernovas. At the very ends of their lives these stars become highly unstable and eject a considerable amount of material from their outer envelopes." [Supernova



http://www.space.com/23227-biggest-star-universe-death-throes.html

[JI7]

1. i can't even get an idea in my mind of that, i wish there was a model of scale

to show something being 1500 times larger . and then to think how much more huge the sun is compared to the planets.

[Ichingcarpenter]

2. I was trying to find a photo for comparison

Too... I only found this but it doesn't cover that star.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

6. kind of a cool video about the size of stars

a couple of years old... but cool nonetheless...

sP

[n2doc]

7. It is a slight bit larger than VY Canis Majoris

see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_known_stars

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Star-sizes.jpg

Which is pretty frickin big.

[think]

3. Fascinating. TY /nt

[dipsydoodle]

4. will eventually explode as a supernova....

Sometimes I just don't follow the reasoning. If its 16,000 light-years away surely it may already have happened.

[Ichingcarpenter]

5. Yes time and space is mind blowing

to me at least that we are starring at the past and if something like this happened much closer we'd already be dead and never see it coming?

The EM-burst travels the speed of light so the only warning we'd have is dying - which most people will accept is a little too late. I'm stuck in this paradox

[sakabatou]

8. Yes, it might have already happened

But it won't be a supernova... it'll be a hypernova, sending out a GRB