What Is the Biggest Star in the Universe?

Some people may think that our Sun, which the Earth revolves around, is the brightest star in the universe. This, however, is not true. Therefore, you may wonder, what is the biggest star in our universe? 

The problem with this questions is that the universe is HUGE, and we haven’t touched, photographed, or seen all of it quite yet. Instead of pinpointing the biggest star in the universe, we can clearly point to the biggest star that we humans have identified and seen.

We then have to consider how we are measuring these celestial bodies. Are we weighing them? Are we taking a tape measure around their waist to measure their circumference? Scientists like to use the measurement called the “solar radius” and “solar mass.” They like to use our Sun to measure size. This means scientists like to place stars and suns next to our own Sun to see how these objects compare. The solar radius is 690,000 km and the mass is 4.3 x 10^30  pounds.

Supergiant stars are the largest stars, and they are much larger than our own Sun. Some of them are thousands of times bigger than the Sun.  Betelgeuse, which happens to be the 9th brightest star in the sky, is much larger than our Sun. The radius of this star is up to 1200 times than of our sun. That means if Betelgeuse was placed where our sun is now, it would eat Jupiter.

If you think Betelgeuse is large, it does not even compare to the largest star we have located. The largest star we have identified is UY Scuti, which was found in 2012. Its radius is in between 1,054,378,000 and 1,321,450,000 miles, which is about 1700 times larger than the radius of Sun. If you replaced our Sun with UY Scuti, the star would go beyond the orbit of Juptier, consuming all the first five planets, and drawing all the celestial bodies around it towards it.

Scientists have begun to classify UY Scuti as a hypergiant star, which means it is more massive than a supergiant. While UY Scuit may be the brightest, it actually is not the most massive. UY Scuti is around 30 times the mass of the Sun, but there are other stars that measure in around 265 times larger than the mass of our Sun.

UY Scuti is the biggest star we have identified to date, but this could change as scientists continue to research the stars. Our Sun is by no means a large star, but scientists like to use our Sun to measure the size and scope of other stars we find.