Blue Hypergiant
the fiercest and most powerful creatures in the universe, are the blue hyper-giants.... R136a1 is such a beast.... en.wikipedia.org anything else more extreme isn't likely to stick around for long enough for us to have seen it because these creatures just don't last that long in astronomical terms. They live fast, and die young, and when they go, they really, really go, usually in a hypernova (100 times more powerful than a supernova). R136a1 is so bright, that if it were ten parsecs away (32.6 light years), it would almost be as bright as the full moon. and while R136a1 is not the *largest* star that we know about in terms of volume (that honour goes to VY Canis Majoris en.wikipedia.org ), R136a1 is the most *massive* star at about 265 times the mass of our sun.... the reason why there is a distinction between size/volume and mass, is because when stars are young, they are still a tight "ball" of burning gas, but when most stars get old, to put it simply, the temperatures in their cores, heat up so much that the outer layers of the star are "puffed" outwards, meaning that their gravity is no longer able to contain the star as a tight ball of gas. In a billion years the core of our own sun will heat up so much that it will in turn, heat up the earth such that life as we know it will no longer be possible. Eventually our own sun will expand into it's "Red Giant" stage en.wikipedia.org swallowing Mercury, Venus, and maybe even Earth. But, blue hyper-giants are so massive <b>...</b>
