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Higher-mass stars leave the main sequence to become blue giants, then bright blue giants, and then blue supergiants, before expanding into red supergiants, although at the very highest masses the giant stage is so brief and narrow that it can hardly be distinguished from a blue supergiant.
The color-color diagram of stars can be used to directly calibrate or to test colors and magnitudes in optical and infrared imaging data. Such methods take advantage of the fundamental distribution of stellar colors in our galaxy across the vast majority of the sky, and the fact that observed stellar colors (unlike apparent magnitudes ) are ...
Rigel, the brightest star in the constellation Orion is a typical blue-white supergiant; the three stars of Orion's Belt are all blue supergiants; Deneb is the brightest star in Cygnus, another blue supergiant; and Delta Cephei (itself the prototype) and Polaris are Cepheid variables and yellow supergiants.
Although most class M stars are red dwarfs, most of the largest-known supergiant stars in the Milky Way are class M stars, such as VY Canis Majoris, VV Cephei, Antares, and Betelgeuse. Furthermore, some larger, hotter brown dwarfs are late class M, usually in the range of M6.5 to M9.5.
Some of the brightest stars in the night sky, such as Rigel and Antares, are in the list. While supergiants are typically defined as stars with luminosity classes Ia, Iab or Ib, other definitions exist, such as those based on stellar evolution. [1] Therefore, stars with other luminosity classes can sometimes be considered supergiants.
The following well-known stars are listed for the purpose of comparison. Antares (α Scorpii A) 680 [66] AD Fourteenth brightest star in the night sky. [67] Widely recognised as being among the largest known stars. [19] Betelgeuse (α Orionis) 640, [68] 764 +116 −62, [69] 782 ± 55 [70] AD & SEIS Tenth brightest star in the night sky. [67]
As Betelgeuse burns through fuel in its core, it has swollen to massive proportions, becoming a red supergiant, the latter phase of giant stars. When the star explodes, the event could be briefly ...
Rigel and the IC 2118 nebula which it illuminates.. It was once believed that blue supergiants originated from a "feeding" with the interstellar medium when stars passed through interstellar dust clouds, [11] [8] although the current consensus is that blue supergiants are evolved high-mass stars, larger and more luminous than main-sequence stars.