![]() Even though hypergiant stars live and die quickly on a cosmic timescale, they don't change quickly enough for us to see them evolve significantly over the course of a human lifetime. Astronomers on Earth detect these differences through measuring the range of different luminosities and colours from star to star. As a result, hypergiants usually change their appearance through their lifetimes. Like all stars, the physical characteristics of hypergiants depend on the delicate balance between the outward radiation pressure from energy escaping their cores, and the inward pull of gravity from their enormous mass. In 2005, an international team of astronomers discovered that dying red giant stars could act like a defibrillator and bring icy planets back from the dead.Ī star like the Sun can sustain itself on a relatively small amount of hydrogen fuel for a period of up to 10 billion years, a hypergiant star with perhaps a hundred times the available fuel will squander it in a million years or less, blazing away as a brilliant but comparatively short-lived cosmic beacon. They are born from the same clouds of interstellar hydrogen gas as normal stars, however their enormous masses of tens or even hundreds of times that of the Sun, create tremendous internal pressures that heat their interiors and accelerate the rate of the nuclear fusion reactions in their core. Hypergiants are stars that burn with the brilliance of millions of Suns. They are examples of hypergiant stars, the most massive stars in the universe. Such stars may sound fanciful, however both these stars exist. How about a star that produces as much energy per second as our Sun does in a 100 days. Imagine a star so massive that if it swapped places with our Sun, it would cover the Solar System as far out as the orbit of Saturn.
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