My current desktop. The pic is of beautiful gasses, nebulas and massive stars found in Northern Cygnus, with Deneb, the supergiant star top center.

Deneb is a HUGE and HOT star! It's 60,000 times brighter than and around 200-300 times more massive than our Sun! It is one of the most luminous stars known! You can Wiki it and see a picture comparing Deneb to the Sun. It is located 1550 LY from us, meaning this pic is what the area looked like around 1,550 years ago. Sadly, because of it's size, Deneb will not live very long. (The larger/brighter/hotter the star, the shorter it's lifespan, because it burns up it's fuel more quickly. Since our Sun is a yellow giant, an average star, it will live billions of years).

Deneb will only last around a million years or so. It has already stopped fusing hydrogen in it's core but because of it's size, it will die in a Supernova explosion.

Stars are AMAZING! Some are thousands of times larger than the Sun and as much as 100,000 degrees Kelvin. (For reference, in the Kelvin scale, water freezes at 273 degrees and boils at 373 degrees). LOL! And in the classification or stars, our poor Sun is just a run-of-the-mill star.

You can find the pic, as well as other GORGEOUS space pics at APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day)'s website located at the link below.

Astronomy Picture of the Day


Pic (c) of it's respected person.