The biggest star ever discovered - AMAZING!

The red supergiant VY Canis Majoris is the biggest star observed so far. The star is between 1800 and 2100 times as large as the Sun. If it were on the sun's seat in the Solar System, it would immerse all the inner planets.

The giant lights very strongly - about half a million times as powerful as the sun. It can be found in the constellation Store Dog, but despite its size and brightness it can not be seen by the naked eye. It's 4900 light years away.

The star was created when an enormous gas cloud collapsed. Pressure and temperature rose until hydrogen began to merge. A warm, bluish giant star with a mass of 30-40 times The sun's masses arose, but so heavy a star lives strong and dies young. After a million years, there was no more hydrogen at the center of the star, and instead, helium began to merge. The star swelled up, its surface became cooler and it turned into the red hypergigant, as we can observe today.

Because of its size, it is a very unstable star that shed large amounts of dust at the space of a few thousand years. Over the next half million years, VY Canis Majoris will explode like a supernova, and there will only be a neutron star or a black hole left.