Meet Stephenson 2-18, the largest star ever discovered. This red hypergiant is so incomprehensibly massive that it reduces our Sun to a pixel.
Let's build some perspective:
If the Sun were a standard beach ball, Stephenson 2-18 would be a skyscraper towering, unending, and utterly dwarfing everything around it.
Its radius is approximately 2,150 times that of the Sun. If it sat at the center of our solar system, its outer edges would extend beyond the orbit of Saturn. Jupiter, Mars, Earth all would be inside this star.
You could fit an estimated 10 billion Suns inside Stephenson 2-18's colossal volume.
Think about that number. Ten billion of our familiar, life-giving Suns, each one already a million times larger than Earth, packed into a single stellar body. It's not just bigger; it's a category of existence we have no vocabulary for.
This is the universe's ultimate flex. Stars like Stephenson 2-18 burn so brightly and so violently that they live fast and die young, existing for only a few million years before collapsing into black holes. They are the brief, brilliant skyscrapers of the cosmos monuments to scale that remind us our entire world orbits a star that is, on the grand stage, barely a flicker.
The next time you feel the Sun's warmth, remember: out there, somewhere in the constellation Scutum, a star is burning so large it could swallow our entire solar system without noticing. Our star is home. But it is not the king.