In the case of UY Scuti, it varies in brightness because it’s constantly yo-yoing in terms of size - making exact measurements of its girth a challenge.īut like any red supergiant - including Betelgeuse - UY Scuti is destined to end its life with a bang. However, intrinsic variables like UY Scuti experience physical changes within, such as pulsations. Some of these stars vary in brightness for external reasons, such as being eclipsed by another star or clouds of gas and dust from our vantage point. But later, researchers noticed UY Scuti’s brightness changes over a period of about 740 days, leading them to reclassify it as a variable star.
![star order by size star order by size](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/DsElGVzo21A/maxresdefault.jpg)
In 1860, astronomers at Bonn Observatory in Germany first cataloged UY Scuti as part of a star survey.
![star order by size star order by size](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61QgXBfpoUL._SL1494_.jpg)
But UY Scuti, located near the center of the Milky Way in the constellation Scutum, is around 1,700 times the Sun’s width. (UY Scuti has already shed a lot of mass.) The biggest of these stars, sometimes called hypergiants, can swell to more than 1,000 times the size of the Sun. But if it had started its life with a dozen or so times its current mass, it could have eventually evolved into a red supergiant. One day, the Sun will become a red giant. It’s the case with Superman, as well as with supergiant stars - a fitting category for the largest known star in the universe, UY Scuti. Just like in the DC Universe, sometimes the clearest way for astronomers to express something is truly extraordinary is to add the prefix super.