What is a Hypergiant Star?
Hypergiant stars are the most massive and luminous stars known. Hypergiant stars comprise about 100-150 solar masses worth of material, approaching the Eddington limit, a theoretical upper limit of stellar mass, after which the star begins throwing off huge amounts of material due to its great radiation. However, there are some hypergiant stars with around 100 solar masses that are thought to have once weighed 200-250 solar masses, challenging current theories of star formation. Hypergiants may be thousands up to 40 million times more luminous than our Sun. Because hypergiants are so massive, their cores are extremely hot and pressurized, leading to rapid nuclear fusion of hydrogen, helium, carbon, neon, oxygen, and eventually silicon. As silicon fuses to iron the core, a process that only takes a couple weeks, the star can extract no more energy from nuclear fusion (the fusion of iron requiring even greater temperature) and a supernova occurs when the star collapses and then “bounces
