The largest star known to man, possibly 2100 times the size of the sun. Man, just think about that for a moment. If you replaced the sun with VY Canis Majoris, the Earth would be INSIDE it, it's surface would reach Saturn and it would vaporize Pluto. That's freakin' HUGE.
...I don;t really know what I'm expecting people to contribute here; maybe I just want that to be the one interesting thing you learn today.
if a human walked at an average speed of 5km/h for 8 hours a day it would take you 2 years 11 months to walk around the whole Earth. It would take 650,000 years to do the same on VY Canis Majoris. Makes you think really, about how utterly massive the universe is, if something that biblically huge isn't even a speck; isnt even equivalent to a grain of sand in the sahara desert in reference to the number of stars in the universe. Scary.
yeah I saw that picture on the wiki. If the sun is a tiny speck like that, that you actually have to zoom in to see that it is in fact, a spec, and the earth is a tiny speck in the same vein in reference to the sun. And we're even smaller in comparison to the earth than the sun is to VY Canis Majoris. And then theres bacteria in our bodies that are even smaller in comparison to us. And then each of those is made of atoms which are roughly 10 billion to a square millimetre. Then each of those is made of quarks which are smaller still, and string theory states that each of THOSE might be made up of countless single dimensional strings. Really makes you look at your life and realise how pointless it is who wins out of Hilary and Obama. lol.
At 1/27/08 10:07 AM, Rai2788 wrote: universe. Scary.
Why is that scary? I find it fascinating!
Doesn't it make you want to explore and discover more!?
At 1/27/08 09:09 PM, Warrickneff wrote:At 1/27/08 10:07 AM, Rai2788 wrote: universe. Scary.Why is that scary? I find it fascinating!
Doesn't it make you want to explore and discover more!?
well yeah it does, but physics states that nothing with intrinsic mass can travel even as fast as the speed of light. and the nearest star is lightyears away. Theres 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and upwards of 100 billion known galaxies. It would take hundreds of trillions of years to explore just our galaxy, and the inevitable heat death of the universe would take place considerably before that. All in all, its scary because its all going on around us, we arent even an important piece of it, and before we get a chance to do anything with it, it or we are gonna die out. Sucks to be the universe, lol
the thing that interests me most about VY Canis Majoris is simply that we have nothing to explain it. There is no scientific understanding in our whole arsenal of scientific understanding that can explain just how the hell a star can be that big. we dont have a lot of time in the universe really, I say if we only get to study one star; thats the one we should do lol.
Did it not go supernova a while ago? Also there will be alot bigger Stars in the galaxy that haven't been discovered.
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