Here is your periodic reminder that space is a vast, violent, hellish place filled with unfathomable beauty and brutal, destructive chaos. Some of the most spectacular events, both visually and gravitationally, are when some poor, massive object like a star gets slurped up by a black hole.
Without stars, our universe would be a much darker, colder place. These balls of plasmic hydrogen and helium gas not only blast heat and light, they come in a stunning array of colors, chemical composition and size. And "big" doesn't begin to describe them. Our sun is 109 times larger than our planet. But our star isn't so special — it's technically average-sized. Some stars, like UY Scuti, an extreme red hypergiant in the constellation Scutum, have a radius 1,700 times our sun, which could fit inside it almost 5 billion times. Compared to UY Scuti, our favorite star is a speck of dust.
