Tag: Hypergiant

1000 Things You Didn’t Know About the Universe #4: Most Stars are Small and Red

ryanLeave a comment
Welcome to a new series of posts that will characterize 1000 amazing facts about the Universe.  There is so much out there that we have yet to learn, and every day, astronomers across the globe are using their research to reveal the deepest secrets of the cosmos.  This series will look at the strangest, coolest, most exciting facts that we have discovered in hundreds of years of modern science. Fact #4: Most of the stars in the universe are red dwarfs smaller than our Sun. There is a leap of understanding that happens when a child learns that our Sun...

Stellar Weight Loss Secrets

ryanLeave a comment
How do stars lose mass? For a star like the Sun, it shoots out a swath of charged particles into space and sheds mass at a rate of 4 million tons per second! Though even at this rate, the Sun only loses 1% of its total mass every 160 Billion years, so it’s not disappearing anytime soon.  For more massive stars, the process can become complex and strange. The red hypergiant VY Canis Majoris, one of the largest known stars, is about 40 times as massive as the Sun, but humungous in scale.  If this star were to replace the...