VY Canis Majoris

Our sun in comparison to just a small section of this enormous
star. If you were to carry it out past the edge of the screen, you'd
see how ridiculously huge this star happens to be.

VY Canis Majoris is the largest star ever discovered. I was watching this show called "How the Universe Works" narrated by Mike Rowe, and I really enjoyed the explanation they had of VY Canis Majoris. Basically, it's a dying star. What keeps it burning at its center is a fusion reactor. Think of hydrogen bombs going off and you essentially understand the reaction taking place in the heart of stars.

So the thing that keeps a star from just flying apart is gravity. In the case of VY Canis Majoris, there is so much mass that when the fusion stops going, gravity is just going to kind of take over and crush the core of the star into a black hole.  Black holes are things that our brightest physicists don't really understand.  Places where infinite gravity takes over and time stops and light can't even escape.

So in the center of VY Canis Majoris, a black hole will eventually form. When that happens, it will consume the star from the inside. But it will do so incredibly fast, like a glutton, too fast that all of the colliding matter will explode in this thing called a hypernova. A hypernova produces more energy in a second than our sun will produce in its entire lifetime. That's just mind-boggling.