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VY Canis Majoris
Details
VY Canis Majoris is an extreme red hypergiant wrapped in a dense, asymmetric cloud of its own ejecta. Its vast infrared glow and clumpy nebula show a star losing matter so violently that the surrounding outflow becomes part of the story.
VY Canis Majoris is one of the clearest examples of a giant star that has outgrown the simple idea of a clean stellar disk. It is an extreme red hypergiant in Canis Major, buried inside an immense, uneven cloud of gas and dust that the star itself has thrown off over time.
That makes VY Canis Majoris important for more than its size. High-resolution images reveal arcs, knots, and asymmetric ejecta, evidence that the star has not been shedding mass smoothly but through powerful episodes that reshape the region around it. Much of its energy is reprocessed by dust, so the object we observe is inseparable from the material it is expelling.
This is why VY Canis Majoris matters. It shows that some of the biggest stars are not just enlarged versions of ordinary stars. They can become unstable, dust-enshrouded systems whose late evolution is written into the nebulae they build around themselves.
735million km
Visual creditscaleofspace.org / CC BY-NC 4.0
Key facts
- Category
- Stars
- Object class
- Red hypergiant star
- Mass
- ~17 solar masses
- Temperature
- ~3,500 K surface
- Scale fact
- 1.98 billion kmdiameter
- Estimated age
- ~8 million years
- Composition
- Hydrogen and helium
Scale context
Where VY Canis Majoris sits on the full axis
By size on the journey, VY Canis Majoris sits between Stephenson 2 DFK 49 and Solar System. The band below uses nearby Stars objects for context.
Shared physical scale
1.29billion km
Together, these objects make the size change around VY Canis Majoris easy to compare at a glance.
Between the smallest and the largest, perspective is everything.
About
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.
Guides turn parts of that scale into curated essays, while focused views let you explore the same range through specific groups of objects.