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We live on Earth and it seems huge to us. But by cosmic standards, it's not even a grain of sand. Look, here's the Earth compared to our sun. And here is our giant sun compared to Esseus. If you were standing on one edge of this star and fired a gun, the bullet would have to travel non-stop for over 60 years just to reach the opposite side. It is usually incredibly difficult to determine the fine boundaries of such stars. The star behaves like a colossal unstable engine, rhythmically inflating and contracting. With each exhale, she literally tears herself apart, enveloping her body in a dense cloud of ejected gas and hot dust. Because of this chaos, the edges of the star are always blurred.
But astronomers were lucky with Essay. First, it is ideally located near the famous double cluster. Secondly, it emits powerful radio signals, molecular masers, right through its sex cocoon. They act as flawless cosmic beacons. This allowed scientists to cut through the visual noise, capture the signals, and calculate the star's size much more accurately than for most other hypergiants. Thanks to this, we know for sure that this giant is actively shedding its mass, destroying itself in a steady, relentless rhythm. This star doesn't even have a fixed size, it pulsates. The difference between its compressed and inflated states is about 120 solar radii. This means that with each pulse, the wall of hot plasma shifts by 83 million km.
The star literally exhales a volume of space equal to the distance from the Sun to the orbit of Mercury, and then draws it back in. Usually giants behave more or less predictably, but this star is shaking in a wild thermodynamic fever. Its temperature is constantly fluctuating. radically changing the spectrum and appearance. Its behavior is so anomalous that scientists wondered: "What if there's a dead star hiding inside?" This idea is known as the Thorne object of utility. A terrifying scenario in which a supergiant engulfs a neutron star. This hypothesis was later abandoned, realizing that this was simply an extremely rapid phase of aging.
Nevertheless, VС Sagittarius will always remain one of the most unstable stars in our galaxy. The orbit in which the Earth moves around the Sun throughout the year. This is a giant ellipse about 300 million km wide. So, in the middle of RW, the Earth's orbit would fit seven times. But that's not what's scary at all. In 2022, astronomers around the world sounded the alarm. This massive star began to rapidly disappear from our radars. This event was called the great eclipse. Zorya did not die. Driven by powerful convective storms, it simply spat out such a colossal cloud of plasma and dust that it completely hid behind it.
The eruption was so dense that it completely blocked our view. Right before our eyes. In just a couple of years, the giant has erased its own light from the sky, showing us live how dying stars build nebulae around themselves If you shrunk the Earth to the size of a billiard ball, the Big Dog would be the size of Mount Everest. If you were to get into a supersonic plane and fly along its equator, it would take you over 1,100 years of continuous flight to just make one circle. Forget that the Sun is a perfectly flat sphere. Ouch, the big dog, is already losing its shape. The core can no longer stably hold the outer layers of such a massive body.
Its magnetic field lines twist into huge knots. And when they rupture, they eject asymmetric arcs and jets of plasma directly from the surface with incredible force. Instead of a smooth shell, it is covered with swirling convective cells. Imagine boiling water, where bubbles are constantly rising and bursting. Only here each such bubble is the size of the Earth's orbit. The star literally begins to tear itself apart, and all this will culminate in a complete collapse of the core and a spectacular explosion at the bottom.
You could throw 3.6 billion of our suns into this star. If you were standing in its center, it would take more than two hours for light to simply reach the surface. This is the only giant on our list located outside the smack path. It is hiding in a nearby dwarf galaxy. Since 2014, astronomers have been observing something incredible. The star suddenly stopped pulsating. Its temperature jumped by 1000°. And right before our eyes, it began to build a curved egg-shaped cocoon of dust around itself.
We watch Zorya try to transform into a completely different type in real time. And scientists still don't fully understand all the mechanics of this process. The red supergiant is shedding its outer shell, likely transitioning into an incredibly rare phase known as a yellow hypergiant. But this new phase will not last forever. that its fuel will finally run out. Gravity wins its last battle. The life of this giant will end with the collapse of its core inward. What will remain after this, a black hole or a super dense neutron star, still remains a mystery. If you placed this star in the place of our sun, its boiling edge would engulf
Jupiter's orbit, and plasma emissions would begin to melt Saturn's rings. This star tests our physical models for strength. In astrophysics, there is a concept called a Hayashi track. A strict theoretical limit to stellar stability. V538 Keel came close to this absolute limit. We found it in a phase of extreme expansion, when it is teetering on the edge. The star has swelled to such a size that its collapse is only a matter of time. It will inevitably shed its monstrous outer shell, and its colossal core will bend under its own gravity, collapsing inward. And one of the most likely scenarios for this giant is the final transformation into a black hole.
The fastest object ever created by man, the Voyager 1 spacecraft, is hurtling through space at a speed of 61,000 km/h. If you sent it straight through Stevenson 218, it would take it almost six years of non-stop flight to get from one end to the other. For years, this Zorya was an internet legend. Astronomers believed it belonged to a specific distant star cluster. But recent, more precise measurements have put her status as the absolute record holder at risk. It turned out that Zorya may not belong to this cluster at all. Instead, it may simply be in the foreground, much closer to Earth. And the laws of optics are not in the plea. If an object is located closer to us, it does not have to be record-breakingly
large to appear so bright. We're still not entirely sure whether this is truly the largest star in the galaxy or just a colossal measurement error. The light from this object has been traveling to us for almost 11 billion years. At such a staggering distance, a lone star should have completely merged with the darkness. We only noticed it thanks to the space cheat code. A massive cluster of galaxies is perfectly positioned right between Earth and this object. Imagine a drop of water on your smartphone screen. It acts like a magnifying glass. The gravity of this
cluster did the same thing. It warped space, captured the dim light of a distant star, and focused it directly into our telescopes. The object was named Godzilla. Astronomers have seen an unstable star, namely the moment when it crossed the point of no return. We caught a supermassive blue star at the very epicenter of a catastrophic eruption. At the peak of this flare, it temporarily swelled to extreme size and blinding luminosity. To date, this is one of the most frightening and extreme transient
objects that humanity has ever managed to record. The larger the star, the shorter its life. Extreme size is not a sign of greatness, it is a death knell. These giants expand to absurd proportions for only a brief moment before tearing themselves apart. But without this destruction, we would not exist. Dying, hypergiants spew carbon, oxygen, and silicates into space. It is from this stellar matter that solid worlds are formed. You and I exist only because, long ago, ancient stellar giants could not cope with their own mass and tore
themselves apart. Everything in the universe has a beginning and an end. And one day our sun will also reach its final limit. But there will be no blinding explosion. It will be a slow, inexorable fading of everything we know: the twilight of our system and the dawn of a new cosmic chapter.
