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Blue supergiant star
Blue supergiants are supergiant stars (class I) of spectral type O. They are extremely hot and bright, with surface temperatures of between 20,000 - 50,000 degrees Celsius. The best known example is Rigel, the brightest star in the constellation of Orion. It has a mass of around 20 times that of the Sun and gives out more light than 60,000 suns added together. Despite their rarity and their short lives blue supergiant stars are heavily represented among the stars visible to the naked eye; their inherent brightness trumps their scarcity. Blue supergiants represent a slower burning phase in the death of a massive star. Due to core nuclear reactions being slightly slower, the star contracts and since very similar energy is coming from a much smaller area (photosphere) then the star's surface becomes much hotter.
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Space & Time News
December 5, 2025
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Dec. 4, 2025 A network of powerful ground-based telescopes captured rare starspot-crossing events on TOI-3884b, revealing cooler patches on the star’s surface and rapid changes tied to its rotation. By ...
Dec. 4, 2025 FROSTI is a new adaptive optics system that precisely corrects distortions in LIGO’s mirrors caused by extreme laser power. By using custom thermal patterns, it preserves mirror shape without ...
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Nov. 29, 2025 Nearly a century after astronomers first proposed dark matter to explain the strange motions of galaxies, scientists may finally be catching a glimpse of it. A University of Tokyo researcher ...
Nov. 26, 2025 Michigan State University astrophysicists are closing in on one of space science’s biggest mysteries: where the galaxy’s most energetic particles come from. Their studies uncovered a pulsar wind ...
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