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[I]n this case we're talking about the star VY Canis Majoris (or VY CMa for short). This ridiculously bloated red hypergiant is about 4,000 light years away in the constellation of Canis Major... VY CMa is an immense star, well over 2 billion kilometers wide. Observations of the star show that it is blasting out way too much infrared light for a star of its kind, which is a telltale sign that it's surrounded by dust. This is usually microscopic grains of rocky (silicate-laden) or carbonaceous (sooty) material around the star (so we call it circumstellar, which is just a...

The sun may appear to be the largest star in the sky but that's just because it's the closest. On a stellar scale, it's really quite average — about half of the known stars are larger; half are smaller. The largest known star in the universe is UY Scuti, a hypergiant with a radius around 1,700 times larger than the sun. And it's not alone in dwarfing Earth's dominant star. The largest of all In 1860, German astronomers at the Bonn Observatory first cataloged UY Scuti, naming it BD -12 5055. During a second detection, the astronomers realized it grows...