The astronomical creatures known as hypergiant stars are genuinely enormous.
The largest hypergiants could fit 10 billion of our Suns, or 14 quadrillion Earths, inside.
It is truly difficult to comprehend the enormous magnitude of the largest stars.
To truly grasp how enormous these stars are, we examined one of the most renowned hypergiant stars, VY Canis Majoris, one of the largest stars in the universe.
VY Canis Majoris is a red supergiant found in the constellation Canis Major, the Great Dog.
How large is VY Canis Majoris compared to the Sun and Earth?
At least 1,420 Suns could fit across the face of VY Canis Majoris, making its diameter close to 2 billion kilometers.
Some estimates place its width at over 2,000 Suns, or nearly 3 billion kilometers.
Earth’s orbital distance from the Sun is only 150 million kilometers, so VY Canis Majoris is at least 13 times broader than this distance.
It would require nearly three billion Suns to populate VY Canis Majoris.
Even Mercury, the smallest planet, can only accommodate 21 million times inside the Sun. A supergiant star like Betelgeuse would accommodate eight times within the hypergiant VY Canis Majoris.
Despite traveling at approximately 300,000 kilometers per second, it would take a light beam six hours to circumnavigate VY Canis Majoris.
It took roughly the same amount of time for images of the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth to return to Earth from the New Horizons spacecraft.