Scale Comparison

Sun vs VY Canis Majoris

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VY Canis Majoris's visible extent is about 1,400 times the Sun's.

Shared physical scale
1.30billion km
Sun1.39 million km
VY Canis Majoris1.98 billion km
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VY Canis Majoris has a quoted diameter about 1,400 times the Sun’s, but its extended atmosphere has no sharp edge.

The star is losing material into an asymmetric dusty nebula. Its apparent diameter depends on wavelength and on where the photosphere is defined, so the ratio should be read as an estimate.

Objects

Object details and sources

Stars

Sun

1.39 million kmdiameter

The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System and the source of almost all the energy reaching its planets. It fuses about 600 million metric tons of hydrogen each second, and energy released in the core takes on the order of 100,000 years to work its way out to the visible surface.

Object class
G-type main-sequence star
Mass
~333,000 Earth masses
Temperature
5,772 K surface
Estimated age
~4.6 billion years
Composition
Hydrogen and helium
Visual creditSolar Dynamics Observatory 2024 / NASA / SDO / HMI science team / Public domainSource: Wikimedia Commons
Stars

VY Canis Majoris

1.98 billion kmdiameter

VY Canis Majoris is an extreme red hypergiant wrapped in a dense, asymmetric cloud of its own ejecta. Much of its light reaches us in the infrared after being absorbed and re-emitted by that dust.

Object class
Red hypergiant star
Mass
~17 solar masses
Temperature
~3,500 K surface
Estimated age
~8 million years
Composition
Hydrogen and helium
Visual creditscaleofspace.org / CC BY-NC 4.0

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Scale of Space is a scroll-based journey through the universe, placing objects on a single logarithmic scale so you can compare size across an unbroken range.

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