Hypergiant stars are massive and luminous, with some weighing up to 150 solar masses. They undergo rapid nuclear fusion and can eventually collapse and explode in a supernova. They have diameters up to 2100 times that of the Sun and are short-lived, existing for only a few million years. Yellow hypergiants are the rarest type of hypergiant, with only seven known in our galaxy.
Hypergiant stars are the most massive and luminous stars known. Hypergiant stars comprise about 100-150 solar masses of material, which approaches the Eddington limit, a theoretical upper limit of stellar mass, after which the star begins to emit enormous amounts of material due to its large radiation. However, there are some hypergiant stars with around 100 solar masses that are thought to have once weighed 200-250 solar masses, challenging current theories of star formation. Hypergiants can be thousands to 40 million times more luminous than our Sun.
Because hypergiants are so massive, their cores are extremely hot and pressurized, leading to rapid nuclear fusion of hydrogen, helium, carbon, neon, oxygen, and eventually silicon. As the silicon melts to stretch the core, a process that takes only a couple of weeks, the star can no longer extract energy from nuclear fusion (iron fusion that requires even higher temperatures) and a supernova occurs when the star it collapses and then “bounces back”. ” outwards. A bit prosaically: when a hypergiant star goes nova, it is sometimes called a “hypernova”.
Hypergiant stars have diameters between about 100 and 2100 times that of the Sun. VY Canis Majoris, a red hypergiant star, is the largest known star, between 1800 and 2100 solar diameters across. Like main-sequence stars, hypergiants come in all spectral flavors: there are blue hypergiants, red hypergiants, and yellow hypergiants. On the other side of the Milky Way galaxy is LBV 1806-20, one of the luminous blue variables, which is the brightest known star, 2 to 40 million times brighter than the Sun. The absolute magnitude of this star is approaches that of some of the smaller galaxies.
Hypergiant stars are short-lived, existing for only a couple of million years before going nova. As a result, they are relatively rare, and hypergiant theories are limited by scant data. Among the hypergiants is one of the rarest known classes of stars, the yellow hypergiants, of which only seven exist in our galaxy.
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