The largest known star in the universe or is it??
When you try looking from the earth the largest star you would see might be our SUN. But does that make our sun the largest star in the universe?
No, not at all you might feel that the sun is the biggest star because it is situated near to us.
Looking into the night sky the brightest star you would find is 'sirius’. And the star that’s nearer to us other than our sun is the 'proximus centuri’. but in the northern hemisphere one would find a dim star(less brightness),this star is known as the 'UY SCUTI’,The largest star that mankind has ever found.
'So there is a huge difference between what we see and what the reality is.’
The UY SCUTI is a star that’s nearly 1700 times larger than our sun. our sun is an average sized star meaning there are many stars that are larger and smaller than our sun in the universe. The stars that are larger than our sun are known as giants, the UY SCUTI is categorised as a super giant(which are the stars larger than the giant stars).
UY SCUTI was discovered in the 1860’s by the German scientists in the 'Bonn observatory’.Its when they observed it the second time they came to know that it’s a large one though.
Let me tell you one thing even though there are many methods that are used to calculate the size of the planets and the stars. Calculating the exact size of any star is never an easy task this is because stars are made up of many layers. Like the inner layer is known as the Corona and the outer layer is known as the photosphere so it becomes very difficult for the scientists to determine the surface of the star. Usually the photosphere is the region still where the size of a star is determined.
Scientists refer UY SCUTI as a variable star as it was found that in a time span of 740 days it shows various pulsating brightnesses (that is once it appeared to be brighter and in other times it appeared to be dim).
Even though UY SCUTI is 1700 times larger than our sun it is only 30 times massive than our sun. The UY SCUTI is slowly loosing it’s mass in the form of solar winds as it becomes very much difficult for gravity to hold up such a humongous star.
But still what amazes the scientists is that UY SCUTI still appears to be big and bright despite of all the mass losses.
The UY SCUTI is situated in the centre of our milky way galaxy and is a part of the star cluster known as 'Scutum’.A hypothetical object travelling at the speed of light would be observed to take about seven hours to travel along UY Scuti’s great circle whereas it would take 14.5 seconds to circle the Sun.
Fun fact though, till 2012 Scientists considered 'UY CANIS MAJORIS' to be the largest star ever known but it was ruled out later because this happened due to some calculation error. And UY SCUTI still stands as the largest star ever known to mankind.
Ending note, if you would be able to replace our sun with the UY SCUTI then it would end up engulfing even our great Jupiter ! So that’s how huge the UY SCUTI really is………….
So that’s it and what I strongly believe is that there might even be stars much larger than the UY SCUTI hiding in the universe. And hopefully some day we might be able to find them as we know that the universe is expanding. and as it expands it becomes way more difficult to study the distant universe.
Thank you.
