Red supergiant

VX Sagittarii is a red supergiant star.

A red supergiant is a larger and brighter type of red giant star. Red supergiants are often variable stars and are between 100 to 1,600 times bigger than the Sun. An example of a red supergiant star is Antares. 119 Tauri, Betelgeuse, and VV Cephei A are other famous examples of red supergiants. Most red supergiant stars explode as supernovae, but some of the brightest become Wolf-Rayet stars before exploding. They are stars that have a lot of light. They are the largest stars in the universe if measured in volume, granting they are not the biggest or brightest. Betelgeuse and Antares are the brightest and best known red supergiants (RSGs), indeed the only first magnitude red supergiant stars.

Red Supergiant Media

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  Betelgeuse pulsating and showing spectral line profile changes (HST UV images)

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  A red supergiant ends its life as a type II supernova (bottom left) in a spiral arm of M74

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  RSGC1, the first of several massive clusters found to contain multiple red supergiants.

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  The Orion region showing the red supergiant Betelgeuse