The red hypergiant Stephenson 2-18, also known as Stephenson 2 DFK 1 or RSGC2-18 is the largest known star in the Universe. It is so big that around 10 billion Suns could fit inside it. Stephenson 2-18 is located 20,000 light-years from Earth in the Scutum-Centaurus Arm of the Mil...
The biggest single entity that scientists have identified in the universe is a supercluster of galaxies called the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall. It's so wide that light takes about 10 billion years to move across the entire structure. For perspective, the universe is only 13.8 billion yea...
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveals the supercluster Westerlund 1, home of one of the largest known stars. Westerlund 1-26, a red supergiant, has a radius more than 1,500 times that of the sun.(Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA) UY Scuti's large radius does not make it the most mas...
Astronomer Harlow Shapley discovered a colossal collection of galaxies in the 1930s that now bears his name. Containing more than 8,000 galaxies and with a mass of more than 10 million billion times that of the sun, the Shapley Supercluster is the largest structure in the local universe, acco...
Talk about a whopper—astronomers have discovered a structure in the universe so large that science says it should not exist.