The pictures here depict a star (the bright dot in the middle) and it’s solar ejecta.
This is no ordinary star.
The star, VY Canis Majoris, is 1800 to 2100 times the size of our sun. It is the largest known star in the galaxy, and if placed in our solar system, would extend to Saturn’s orbit. If for some mentally deranged reason you wanted to walk the circumference of VY Canis Majoris, assuming a walking speed of 3 mph/8 hours a day and a suit somehow capable of protecting you from temperatures reaching five goddamn thousand degrees Fahrenheit, it would take you approximately six hundred and fifty thousand years to get back to where you started. Compare that to the paltry 310 years required to walk around Sol, our sun, or the downright pedestrian and very reasonable 2 years 7 months to complete a circuit around the Earth.
So, now we that we have a better idea of how fucking gigantic this combusting ball of flammable gasses is, consider its solar ejecta. It easily extends at least ten times the diameter of the sun itself, which is, well, beyond any sane person’s ability to comprehend. I give up.
th huge awesome person to visit this blog!
4 comments:
i am suffering from hugeawesome withdrawal.
updates, please.
some ideas:
-supermassive black holes
-milkomeda
-that crater that doesn't look like a crater somewhere in mexico or something
your biggest fan,
ceci
The calculations above are for walking only 8 hours per day. Here are some other calculations to understand the size in relative terms...
If you walked non-stop at 3 mph, it would take...
- 1 year to walk around the earth
- 103.25 years to walk around the sun.
- 227,429 years to walk around VY Canis Majoris
If you flew non-stop in a Boeing 747 (550 mph), it would take...
- 2 days to fly around the earth.
- 6 1/2 months (206 days) to fly around the sun.
- 1,241 years to fly around VY Canis Majoris
If you flew non-stop at mach 3.2 in a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird (2194 mph), it would take...
- 11 hours to fly around the earth.
- 52 days to fly around the sun.
- 311 years to fly around VY Canis Majoris
The above calculations are based on the following:
- Circumference of earth = 24,902 miles
- Circumference of earth = 2,713,406 miles
- Diameter of VY Canis Majoris = 3.63 billion kilometers (per Wikipedia) = diameter of 1,902,484,472 Miles = cirumference of 5,976,831,241 Miles
Maybe also include the space station orbit speed as comparision :-)
Im sure i have seen VY with the naked eye. You just have to look for it's position in Canis Major and look passed it and not trying to look directly at it. It's the dimmer left one of the 2 red ones. I was on a remote farm with next to zero artificial lights at the time.
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