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The Largest Things in the Universe

Posted on by Alex Pratte

 

 

canismajorisWhile I was looking up random astronomy stuff, I came across an article that lists the top ten biggest things in the universe. Here are a few of the gigantic things that made the list:

Biggest Star – VY Canis Majoris

VY Canis Majoris is the largest star that we know of; it has a radius 1420 times larger than our sun’s. To put this sun’s size into perspective, if you put VY Canis Majoris where our sun is, it would extend past Saturn. That’s pretty big.

Biggest Planet- TRES4

TRES4 is located in the constellation Hercules, and is about 70 percent larger than Jupiter, however, it only has about 80% percent of the mass of Jupiter. This is because of how close the planet orbits its sun. It is believed that the intense heat that it receives causes the gases that make up the planet to expand.

Biggest Black Hole-QJ287

QJ287 is the largest black hole that we have spotted. It is believed to be about 18 billion times the mass of our sun and is a supermassive black hole in the center of a universe. The crazy thing about black holes is that there is no theoretical limit to how big they can get so there could be way bigger ones.

This article goes on to talk about some even crazier stuff that’s so big I can’t even comprehend, (e.g. the cosmic web, the Huge LGQ etc) so if you want to read about some more big stuff check out the article here. Picture can be found here.

 

Shout-out to all the Astronomy Ladies

Posted on by Alex Pratte

In a lot of professions today it seems like the ladies are under appreciated, so for my fourth blog I thought it would be nice to give some credit to a couple of smart lady astronomers that paved the way for women in the sciences. As I learned in a really cool BBC article that can be found here, two of those women are Fiametta Wilson and Grace Cook. During WWI, while all the guys where off shooting each other, these two women were observing shooting stars and making sure all the records on meteors were kept up to date. These two were among the first four women to be awarded fellowship of The Royal Astronomical Society which was a huge milestone for women and science (way to go). According to a Dr. Mandy Baily, “in the years between 1910 and 1920 Wilson observed somewhere in the region of 10,000 meteors and accurately calculated the paths of about 650 of them – no small achievement!”(BBC). She also did all of this while bombs were being dropped everywhere and on one occasion had a bunch of falling shrapnel almost hit her (but she still finished her research).

This just goes to show that women are just as capable as men when it comes to observing and calculating the path of meteors. Take that misogynists. Also important to note that the picture below is not just a bunch of random women in front of books. These are the leading women in UK astronomy today.

88207621_raswomenmosaic