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Asked by to Ben, Emily, Hattie, Jemma, Veronica on 24 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Emily Hayward answered on 24 Jun 2014:
Great question Hassanabid00!
Currently the largest star known is called UY Scuti and space scientists think its about 1708 times the size of the sun – pretty huge eh? We dont currently know about every star or how big they are as many are too far away to get information on. The sun always seems pretty big that its amazing to think what appears a tiny little star in the sky at night is actually 1708 times bigger, but is just much much further away!
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Jemma Rowlandson answered on 24 Jun 2014:
Hi!
That’s actually a bit of a tough question to answer. The stars are so far away than it can be quite hard to measure them properly, the three biggest stars are UY Scuti, NML Cygni and WOH G64. All of them are so big that if you put one of them in the same place as our Sun it would swallow up Jupiter! Another way to look at is that they are all over 2,000,000,000 kilometers wide.
The stars are all so big that when they die (which will happen to UY Scuti soon) they will blow up in a massive explosion called a ‘supernova’. What’s left of the star will collapse to form a black hole. These are only the stars we know about though! Astronomers are always finding new stars and planets, so you never know they could find even larger stars!
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