Stars in our Universe

Have you ever really realized that stars are awesome?

Our ancient ancestors did, and created numerous monuments and stories about the wonders of our star, the Sun.  However, the Sun is just one of billions upon billions of stars in our universe. It's a freckle on the proverbial face of our known world.

To put it in perspective, there are about 100 thousand MILLION stars in just the Milky Way. If you haven't realized it by now, that is a huge number. Have you ever tried to count every single grain of sand on a beach? Well that's what today's scientists are trying to do with our universe!

But stars aren't just numerous in our universe, they're also behemoths of creation as you'll see in the picture below.

What you see here is the largest star known to mankind, VY Canis Majoris. This star is classified as a red hypergiant, and saying this star is huge is an understatement...it's 1.7 billion miles in diameter and weighs about as much as 600 suns. 

However, that's not the only magical stars event we know about. As a quick refresher, the larger something gets, the more gravity it produces (due to the density of matter in space time, the more something weighs the more it will bend light and space). Now, when we pair this statement with a dying star which has burned through most of it's fuel (if not all of it) we come to an event called a supernova.

Supernovas occur when a very massive star burns through all of it's nuclear fuel. The majority of the outer parts of the star are thrown violently into space in a large explosion, however the very very very dense and gravitationally inclined core of the star collapses under its own weight forming what we know today as black holes.

Black holes are some of the scariest and beautiful things in our known universe. They are a place where space, time, light, and all matter cannot escape. They're kind of like that bad college party that your friend really wants to stay at for a few more hours.

Black holes, are the end all be all of our universe, and unfortunately they can get really really big. If you're still interested in stars and black holes, feel free to check out the linked video below! It's about 20 minutes long and gives you an in depth view into our universe (and a long look at supermassive black holes). Until then!