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Asked by lala to Louise, Michaela, Sian, Steve, Yvette on 17 Jun 2010 in Categories: General.
Question: If people say the Sun is a medium-sized star, what would be a large-sized star?
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Louise Johnson answered on 17 Jun 2010:
Two large stars can be seen in the constellation Orion – Rigel and Betelgeuse, both about 18 times the mass of the sun. Betelgeuse is less dense than the sun and has has 1000 times the radius. I just found out astronomers reckon it might go supernova in the next 1000 years!
Large stars are rare and burn up fast so there aren’t as many of them around as the smaller ones.
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Michaela Livingstone answered on 17 Jun 2010:
Well the sun is relatively small to a lot of other stars. You get different sorts of stars, one type of these is called the supergiant class and they can be thousdands of times brighter and hundreds of times bigger. Google tells me the biggest star found yet is10 million times as bright as the Sun. If it were in the same position as the Sun it would engulf the Earth and stretch even further beyond.
(“The largest known star is VY Canis Majoris; a red hypergiant star in the constellation Canis Major, located about 5,000 light-years from Earth. University of Minnesota professor Roberta Humphreys recently calculated its upper size at more than 2,100 times the size of the Sun. Placed in our Solar System, its surface would extend out past the orbit of Saturn. Light takes more than 8 hours to cross its circumference!”)
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Steven Kiddle answered on 17 Jun 2010:
This explains star types http://www.universetoday.com/guide-to-space/stars/types-of-stars/
The largest type of star is a supergiant star, which can be between 10-70 times as massive as our sun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supergiant , KY Cygni, and μ Cephei are two supergiants.
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