This causes a runaway collapse where the star no longer generates enough outward pressure to keep it from imploding under its own gravity. Unlike when it combines lighter elements, when a star forces two iron nuclei together, it doesn’t release any energy it instead takes energy away from the environment. Making iron is a death sentence for stars. And as long as UY Scuti doesn’t expel too much mass over the course of its remaining life, it will eventually start producing iron. After exhausting the helium fuel in its core, it will ferociously forge increasingly heavy elements. In the case of UY Scuti, it varies in brightness because it’s constantly yo-yoing in terms of size - making exact measurements of its girth a challenge.īut like any red supergiant - including Betelgeuse - UY Scuti is destined to end its life with a bang. However, intrinsic variables like UY Scuti experience physical changes within, such as pulsations.
Some of these stars vary in brightness for external reasons, such as being eclipsed by another star or clouds of gas and dust from our vantage point. But later, researchers noticed UY Scuti’s brightness changes over a period of about 740 days, leading them to reclassify it as a variable star. In 1860, astronomers at Bonn Observatory in Germany first cataloged UY Scuti as part of a star survey. But UY Scuti, located near the center of the Milky Way in the constellation Scutum, is around 1,700 times the Sun’s width. (UY Scuti has already shed a lot of mass.) The biggest of these stars, sometimes called hypergiants, can swell to more than 1,000 times the size of the Sun. But if it had started its life with a dozen or so times its current mass, it could have eventually evolved into a red supergiant.
One day, the Sun will become a red giant. It’s the case with Superman, as well as with supergiant stars - a fitting category for the largest known star in the universe, UY Scuti. Just like in the DC Universe, sometimes the clearest way for astronomers to express something is truly extraordinary is to add the prefix super.
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