NASA Discovers A New Big Star! Size Comparison 2022 Most MYSTERIOUS Recent Discoveries

The sun may appear to be the largest star in the sky but that's just because it's the closest. On a stellar scale, it's really quite average — about half of the known stars are larger; half are smaller. The largest known star in the universe is UY Scuti, a Hypergiant with a radius around 1,700 times larger than the sun. And it's not alone in dwarfing Earth's dominant star. In this video we will check out, NASA discovers a new unbelievably big star size comparison 2021.

But first, a word on stars!

There are many different types of stars out there; some bigger, some smaller. Before going any further, however, you have to understand something: stars don’t have nice, tidy boundaries. They don’t have a rigid surface like a rocky planet or moon. Instead, these atomic fireballs have pretty diffuse surfaces as the super-heated mass of gas that makes them up slowly thins out into nothingness. What astronomers use in lieu of a surface is a star’s photosphere — the level at which the star becomes transparent (i.e. where photons can escape the star). So, going forward, know that if I mention a star’s surface, I’m talking about its photosphere. The second important thing to keep in mind is that we haven’t ever measured a star directly. Nobody went up to one with a ruler and started adding up distances. What we do have are estimations — reliable estimations, for the most part, but estimations nonetheless. Depending on a range of factors, such as distance or structures around stars or between them and Earth, these estimations can be more or less accurate, and fall within a smaller or larger area of confidence (i.e. “we know it’s between x and y miles/kilometers wide”).

Smallest, densest white dwarf!

Astronomers may have discovered the smallest and heaviest white dwarf star ever seen, a smoldering ember about the size of our moon but 450,000 times more massive than Earth, a new study finds. White dwarfs are usually about the size of Earth and are the cool, dim cores of dead stars that are left behind after average-size stars have exhausted their fuel and shed their outer layers. Our sun will one day become a white dwarf, as will about 97% of all stars. Although the sun is alone in space without a stellar partner, many stars orbit around each other in pairs. If these binary stars are both less than eight times the mass of the sun, they will both evolve into white dwarfs over time. The newfound white dwarf, designated ZTF J1901+1458, is located about 130 light-years from Earth and may be an example of what can happen when white dwarf pairs merge. If the white dwarfs were more massive, they would explode in a powerful thermonuclear explosion known as a Type Ia supernova. However, if their combined masses fell below a certain threshold, they could form a new white dwarf heavier than either of its parents, which is what scientists think happened in the case of ZTF J1901+1458. "Our discovery is the most massive and smallest white dwarf ever found," study lead author Ilaria Caiazzo, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, told Space.com. The discovery was made using the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in California, which scans the entire northern sky every two nights looking for cosmic bodies that blink, erupt, move or similarly change in brightness. Study co-author Kevin Burdge, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, first spotted the new white dwarf based on its high mass and rapid spin. The researchers used a host of telescopes to help analyze the dead star, which is about 100 million years old or less. These included the Hale Telescope at Palomar, the W.M. Keck Observatory's Keck I telescope, the European Gaia space observatory, the University of Hawaii's Pan-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) and NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. The scientists found the white dwarf was about 2,670 miles (4,300 kilometers) wide, making it a bit larger than the moon, which is about 2,158 miles (3,474 km) in diameter. ZTF J1901+1458's tiny size makes it the smallest known white dwarf, edging out previous record holders, RE J0317-853 and WD 1832+089, which each have diameters of about 3,100 miles (5,000 km). At the same time, the newfound white dwarf is about 1.35 times the mass of our sun, which may make it the most massive white dwarf discovered yet.