Our sun, ringed, shown next to red hyper giant VY Canis Majoris |
This staggering image shows how our sun - which is so big it accounts
for 99.86% of the mass in the solar system - would look next to the
biggest star in the universe.
VY Canis Majoris is so large that it
is impossible to even represent the earth in this picture as it would
measure less than one thousandth of a single pixel.
It is only
possible to show the earth in a second image, as a tiny speck next to
our own sun, which itself is utterly dwarfed in scale by Rigel - a blue
supergiant that is the brightest star in the constellation Orion.
Rigel, too, is barely even visible compared to Canis Majoris. |
The earth is just visible alongside our own sun, which is dwarfed by Rigel |
The mindbending scale of the universe's largest bodies was laid bare at the International Astronomy Show, where researchers released a stunning new video which allows us to see for the first time how insignificant the Earth is, even in our own galaxy.
But monster Canis Majoris makes Rigel (ringed) look like a drop in the ocean |
It is 4,892 light years from Earth and has a circumference of 5.46billion miles - around 2,000 times that of our sun. It would take a passenger jet 1,100 years to fly round it once.
Being much further from its core though, the surface temperature of VY Canis Majoris is cooler than our sun at around 3,000C - compared to our star's 5,600C.
Into perspective: Our sun (ringed) against Rigel with the huge form of Canis Majoris lurking behind |
Humans have always, wrongly, perceived the sun to be large |
After VY Canis Majoris explodes its remaining core will be big enough to create a black hole.
French astronomer Jerome Laland was the first to record VY Canis Majoris in 1801.
Emma Wride of the AstroCymru Project, which aims to inspire the next generation of astronomers, revealed the video at the astronomy show.
She said: "It is a relatively recent discovery in the Milky Way.
"Each big object in space is part of a much larger structure - the large-scale structure of the visible universe.
"We only see a minuscule piece of the universe. Big is bigger than we can ever imagine."
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