Define etch: to produce (something, such as a pattern or design) on a hard material by eating into the material's surface (as byâ¦ â etch in a sentence to produce (something, such as a pattern or design) on a hard material by eating into the material's surface (as by acid or laser beam)â¦
This staggering image shows how our sun - which is so big it accounts for 99.86% of the mass in the solar system - would look next to the biggest star in the universe. VY Canis Majoris is so large that it is impossible to even represent the earth in this picture as it would measure less than one thousandth of a single pixel.
What is the biggest star we know? Answer: The largest known star (in terms of mass and brightness) is called the Pistol Star. It is believed to be 100 times as massive as our Sun, and 10,000,000 times as bright! In 1990, a star named the Pistol Star was known to lie at the center of the Pistol Nebula in the Milky Way Galaxy. In 1995, it was suggested that the Pistol Star was so massive it was throwing off the mass that actually created the Pistol Nebula. Observations from the Hubble Space Telescope in 1997 confirmed the relationship between the star and the nebula. Astronomers are currently unsure how a star this massive could have formed or how it will act in the future. The Pistol Star appears as the bright white dot in the center of the image shown above. The Hubble Space Telescope's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) was needed to take the picture, because the star is hidden at the galactic center, behind a great deal of obscuring dust.