Comment on perspective
observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 5 weeks agoYes, but red supergiants differ from the sun in that their photospheres are extremely dilute and don’t have a sharp transition to the corona. I don’t know the details of this particular star but take Betelgeuse as an example (it’s probably not particularly large for this catrgory), it’s radius is ~640 the sun’s per Wikipedia, which gives a volume of ~260 million that of the sun. But it is only x15 times as massive as the sun, so on average ~20 million times less dense.
xenoclast@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Meaning a little less than half of that radius is way way way less than 20 million times less dense. That’s wild.
I think about that a lot when looking a lot luminous gas clouds that are millions of lys across. We can only “see” it because all the photons coming from that region of space is concentrated in a tiny visible area.