VY Canin Majoris

I’m getting to learn quite a lot of stuff about the universe because of Darwin.  He is properly obsessed about the universe and I like it.

One thing I learned recently was about the largest known star in the universe, VY Canis Majoris.  Our star is pretty big but this thing is mega massive.  Let’s pretend the Earth was flat and the Earth was represented by a size 5 football (22cm in diameter and 450g in weight) sat by the edge of Nelson’s Column.  In comparison, if you placed the edge of a scaled replica of our sun in the same place the ball would touch the column about half way up and the furthest edge of the ball would be about 24 metres away, probably blocking the road.

Put a scaled replica VY Canis Majoris by Nelson’s Column (The column would have to be approximately 800 miles high to do so, 3x higher than the International space station!) the other edge of the ball would be in Moscow.

That’s pretty big init?