Here is an interesting video about the universe's larges stars. It begins by comparing the Earth to Mercury, Venus and even our own Sun. Indeed the sizes get so unbelievable when the last star VY Canis Majoris is displayed among other giant stars. This star is so massive its size would engulf our solar system all the way to Saturn! Simply mind blowing

Enjoy.



edit: The music is quite loud so lower it if you'd like.

This post was edited by Jazz_Thing on Mar 28 2009 09:39am

there as a gif of alot of the enormous stars that displayed it in a much more relative way. thought i did like how they included some of the galaxies here

If you have this .gif feel free to post it, I just can't believe how massive some of these stars are. Also there are some black holes that are just immense, there is one that is the size of an entire galaxy, here is the photo. They say it has the mass of roughly 18 billion suns.



This post was edited by Jazz_Thing on Mar 28 2009 01:52pm

well a black hole by definition is infinitesmally small, its gravitational pull however, would be the size youre talking about. and theoretically, the center of every galaxy is a blackhole

ugh, i would say scaling stars to galaxies is pretty difficult

You actually can't see a black hole, only the gas clouds that are attracted by it. By reaching the horizon from which you would be able to see the black hole, you would not be able to return and thus be absorbed by it.

But do black holes themselves have mass? Or is this largely uncharted territory in science?

Black holes have a very high mass (And thus having a large gravitational pull), but also a very high density, which in turn makes them small.

blackholes definately have mass.. and according to hawking its actually possible for subatomic particles on the event horizon to escape (they are torn) and blackholes lose energy/mass and eventually revert back to neutron stars or whatever

hawking has a formula calculating the number of years it takes for a blackhole to decay... needless to say its much longer than humans will be around...

This post was edited by 09_Random on Mar 29 2009 10:32am

Here is a question are black holes a form of star? Or are they a completely different form of matter all together?