What is the biggest star in the entire Universe.. (Page 2)  Corwin: Hypergiants tend to implode into Black Holes when they die... but a giant star not large enough to become a Black Hole, that went supernova in our stellar neighborhood, would blast our atmosphere out into space, boil away our oceans, while at the same time cooking every living thing with massive amounts of radiation. Good times.  Batman809: omg thats a terribloe way to die wat u jus explianed... and bb king was a legend in his time Corwin: We're safe from that particular demise, according to our Astrophysicists and Astronomers. There's no star such as this close enough to our solar system to have us worried... at least for the next few billion years. But the Milky Way will be colliding with Andromeda around that time, and our stellar neighborhood will be quite a different place when that occurs, but I don't suspect I'll live that long. But not to worry... in the meantime there's plenty of other ways our planet could meet it's demise.  Climate change, a global industrial accident, thermonuclear warfare, a giant asteroid smashing us to oblivion... hell, maybe an evil race of technologically advanced space aliens will exterminate us so they can use the Earth to raise their Gorgon herds. We'll just have to wait and see.   Hatman20: This is a weird question to try and answer. First off, cooler stars can grow bigger than hotter ones. Personally, of the list that was in that video, you should probably be more impressed by the pistol star than the others. Blue hyper-giants are far harder to find than red ones, and prove to be far more energetic. The Pistol star is the brightest known object in our own galaxy. But if want to see the REAL scary shit, then you have to look to the protogalaxies that began forming at the beginning of the universe. They existed in a thick cloud of almost pure hydrogen. it was the ultimate fusion powerhouse. The stars there had energy AND size that would put the Pistol star to shame. Sadly, the only observations of this are observations of galaxies 13 billion light years away. Trying to view something that far away lowers resolution down so low, it's nearly impossible to pick out individual stars. If you're interested in scale though, I'd recommend checking out the Crab Nebula. If I remember correctly, for a long time, the largest star near our galaxy was thought to be inside it. It was theoretically too big to be capable of existing. It wasn't until better measurements of it that scientists found it was actually about 10 massive stars all clustered together extremely close. The crab nebula itself is notable for its scale. If it were as far away from earth as the Orion nebula, it would take up about 1/3 of the night sky. Corwin: Stars have a size-limit to how big they can be. At a certain critical mass, they implode into black holes. Corwin: Sometimes when two massive stars collide, if their combined mass is great enough to reach critical mass, it will implode into a black hole. Like I said, there's a limit to how massive a star can be, and still be considered a star. Corwin: Gravity has everything to do with it. Gravity is caused by mass. Gravity is what compresses a star's core and ignites nuclear fusion. When the mass is great enough, gravity is what collapses the mass into a point of infinite density called a "singularity", and a Black Hole is born... gravity so great that even light can't escape it. (edited for typo) (Edited by Corwin)  Quantum Zero31: Black Holes being star corpses can be fairly massive aswell. IF I remember right, The most massive known was said to be something like 18 billion stellar masses- or more than half the size of our solar system. Most galaxies including our own Milky Way, are believed to have massive black holes at the centre of them, and are believed to influence the structures of such galaxies Corwin: When we refer to the "size" of a Black Hole, as in "half the size of the solar system", it is the "event horizon" that that would be referring to... that is the point at which matter falling towards the central singularity reaches the speed of light. The singularity at the center of that event horizon has no spacial measurements whatsoever, but rather is a point of infinite density which can only be measured in "mass" and "spin". Supermassive Black Holes such as those that reside in the centers of galaxies are not the remnants of massive stars, but rather were spontaneously created early in the history of the universe as the result of the collapse of massive clouds of matter, and were the seeds in which those galaxies grew around. These Supermassive Black Holes continue to grow in mass as they digest more matter that spirals into them. Hatman20: It's true. I remember trying to talk about it in my 8th grade science class. About 6 students who were talking to me about it. All of them didn't believe me and started turning into little pieces of shit about it, calling me a retard. Tried to tell them that a gravity well that strong can't JUST be caused by an object of immense mass, it must also be of tiny size as well. Otherwise, the tidal forces will be too spread out to make a gravity well that is effectively infinitely deep. Every last one of them was like "Hurr, I seen pictures of it, it's bigger than that". I kept saying "First of all, those are artist renditions, not actual pictures. Second of all, what you're looking at is an event horizon, which is nothing more than the LACK of light. It's an illusion caused by the gravity of the singularity. The event horizon isn't a physical object" Nope. They didn't want to hear it. Anyway, one of them was my friend who was actually fairly reasonable compared to the other guys, and if nothing else, I wanted to prove to him that black holes had singularities of almost no measurable size. So, next day, I brought in a box filled with stacks of printed off scholarly articles, Discover, Scientific American, National Geographic, Nature, and Smithsonian magazines containing articles about black holes, and my personal Denver Museum of Nature and Science volunteer handbook, which contained information about black holes we were officially required to know in case anybody asked. Dude took a look at the handbook, and decided he didn't need to read the rest of the sources to realize both that I was right, and why. Here's a pretty good analogy to explain why a black hole must be tiny AND massive to have that much gravity. Imagine if a car ran over your arm. It'd hurt, right? all 2 tons of metal pressing down on your arm, right? Well, truth is, that's not as bad as it COULD be. The tire spreads weight evenly across the surface of your arm, which actually reduces the amount of weight it feels in any one spot. Now, you could think of this as the way a gravity well behaves with planets and stars, which are quite large. They are heavy, sure, but they spread their mass out across the space time continuum. A black hole, on the other hand, is a bit more like having that 2 ton car attached to a 6 inch nail, and then having all 2 tons pressing down on your arm right at the pointy end of that nail. All 2 tons, right into that tiny spot only a couple millimeters wide. Needless to say, it'd hurt like fucking hell. Again, this is kinda what black holes are like. Because they are so unbelievably massive in such a tiny space, their mass isn't spread out. Instead, it's focused into one little spot. And that creates a gravity well so deep, not even light can escape it. 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