VY Canis Majoris is the largest known star, with a volume nearly a billion times that of the Sun. It’s in its final stage and ejecting material into a surrounding nebula. It’s so large that it can fuse together elements up to iron and will eventually collapse into a supernova.
The largest known star is VY Canis Majoris, a red hypergiant measuring between 1800 and 2100 solar radii. Its volume is nearly a billion times that of the Sun, although its density is much less. Canis Majoris means big dog in Latin. If it were in the solar system, its surface would completely reach the orbit of Saturn. Another way to put it is that this star is about 9 astronomical units (AU) across, nine times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. There must be larger stars located in other galaxies, but we currently don’t have telescopes powerful enough to resolve them. . Hypertelescopes can help in this regard.
VY Canis Majoris is a star in his final agony. It’s ejecting massive amounts of material into a surrounding nebula that makes the star stuck in the visible spectrum. It must be observed in the infrared portion of the spectrum. The star’s Death Nebula is about 4500 AU across, about fifty times larger than the star itself and much larger than our solar system. Within the gas nebula is a smaller circumstellar dust region, which has a temperature of 760 K and a width of about 260 AU. The star’s surface probably has a temperature around 3650 K, extremely cold for a star.
Unlike main-sequence stars such as our Sun, VY Canis Majoris has no distinct photosphere and thus recedes into space. While it’s the largest known star, it’s definitely not the most massive, in part because it’s already ejected much of its mass into the surrounding nebula.
Like all red giants and hypergiants, VY Canis Majoris is so large because it has exhausted all the hydrogen in its core and has begun fusing hydrogen on a shell outside a helium core. In fact, VY Canis Majoris is so large that it can fuse together helium, lithium, and so on, all the way up the periodic table to iron and beyond. It will eventually have a core made mostly of iron, just like planets. The problem with iron’s post-melting reactions is that they don’t produce energy and therefore can’t balance the gravitational pressure generated by the star. When all the fusion fuel is gone, the star will catastrophically collapse in a supernova explosion and become a black hole.
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