Jul 212010
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10707416
Summary: Star R136A1, 22,000 lightyears away, has a mass 265 times that of the sun and is about a million times brighter.
“If it replaced the Sun in our Solar System, it would outshine [it] by as much as the Sun currently outshines the full Moon,”
Stars far smaller than this blow themselves up as supernovae at the end of their lives. It would be interesting to know if that’s the fate for giant stars like this… and what that would mean for Earth to have a super-supernova that close.
2 Responses to “Monster Stars”
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You want to see a big star, check out the drawing of VY Canis Majoris compared to the Sun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergiant
Can you imagine the gravity field on that thing? :-O
I mean, it’s not a red super-giant, but a yellow-type sun.
A planet orbiting around it at the distance of Mercury would be going around it so fast that it would look like a blur in a photo.
It probably wouldn’t even be able to survive; tidal stresses on it would tear it apart long before it got to that close of a orbital distance to the star’s surface.