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Asked by v4a833t to Saiful, Petra, Jenny, Jawwad, Iain, Bethan on 17 Jan 2017.
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Bethan Charles answered on 17 Jan 2017:
There are many times more stars in our universe than there are grains of sand on every beach on Earth, so it is really hard to be exactly sure of the largest star. However, one of the largest stars we know of is Canis Majoris.
If you were travelling at the speed of light it would take you almost 4000 years to reach it and the star itself is 1500 times larger than our own sun. A passenger jet would take 1100 years to fly around it just once!
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Comments
Karl commented on :
Although VY Canis Majoris is the largest star by volume that we know of ( you could fit 9,300,000,000 suns inside it!!), it’s mass is only about 30 suns.
The most massive star that we know about is in the Large Magellanic Cloud ( a “tiny” galaxy that orbits the Milky Way), about 163,000 light years away. The star, with the catchy name R136a1, has the mass of 310 suns. interestingly the theoretical upper limit for a stars mass is around 150 suns. It’s thought that R136a1 formed when several massive stars collided. Becasuse of it’s insanely large mass, it’s pretty unstable and is due to explode in a hypernova at some point in the near future (don’t worry! “near future” could mean millions of years in this case).