Interesting and huge planets

When debating on what is the largest heavenly body or in another way of asking what is the largest star or planet in the Universe the answer may surprise you. The sun is the way we judge the massive size of all planets and stars. This is for a very good reason as the sun is a huge fire ball of life-giving energy. The question returns to us and has been rephrased to what is the largest star (since we know that stars are generally larger and hotter than planets) that we know of currently?  Before we jump straight to the answer, let’s take a look at our own Sun for a sense of scale. Our familiar star is a mighty 1.4 million km across (870,000 miles). That’s such a huge number that it’s hard to get a sense of scale. The Sun accounts for 99.9% of all the matter in our Solar System. In fact, you could fit one million planet Earths inside the Sun.

The formula for determining the size of a star is quite complex and is used all the time by astronomers. A solar radius is 690,000 km (432,000 miles) and a solar mass is 2 x 1030 kilograms (4.3 x 1030 pounds). That’s 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg. One huge, very well-known and famous as stars go is the star in our galaxy known as Eta Carinae. This monster of a heavenly body is a very big star indeed. To be able to begin to understand and maybe comprehend how big this star is we should compare and contrast the sun, earth and Eta Carinae. The star is located, thankfully, approximately 7,500 light years away, and weighing in at 100 solar mass is the biggest star in our filed of vision. To address just how large this star is we can look at a brief statement about relative sizes. At a whopping 4 million times as bright as the Sun, Eta Carina is a big boy indeed! The interesting fact about most stars is that they blow with a solar wind, losing mass over time. But Eta Carinae is so large that it casts off 500 times the mass of the Earth every year. With so much mass lost, one would think that this star would be a little zephyr in no time flat!

We can think to our sun and realize that it too will die out one day and we will be left in the proverbial dark. That is in no danger of happening anytime soon as the latest countdown to when the sun will explode in one last radiant blast of pure energy is around 500 billion years. We think that all of us and even the younger ones will have already checked out for the last time from planet earth. Another interesting notion to think about is what will our futuristic relatives do for a sun when that happens? Of course we cannot tell right now and is certainly for the best.