Depending on its initial mass, it might collapse to a compact hot star known as a white dwarf (when the star's mass is less than 1.4 times the mass of our sun) or to a neutron star (for stars 1.4 to about three times the mass of our sun) or to a black hole (for stars more massive than three times the mass of our sun).
These early structures are "supermassive" -- perhaps millions of times the mass of our sun -- and most of the light around them doesn't make it out of their galaxies, Schawinski said.
Such black holes ranging in size from 1, 000 to 10, 000 times the mass of the sun should sit inside globular clusters like scaled-down versions of galactic black holes at least in theory.
Some galaxies contain black holes with billions of times the mass of the sun, occupying a volume no bigger across than the orbit of Neptune around our solar system but extending their influence through a cosmic bubble 30 million light years across.
Sure enough, this light was bent by the mass of the sun, confirming Einstein's theory.
Previously observed giants had been seen to get as big as 150 times the mass of our Sun.
Similarly, the mass of the sun distorts the space-time around it.
Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, has a colossal black hole at its core, too, which is some three million times the mass of our Sun.
BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Deepest X-rays tell merger story
Seven billion light years away and with two million billion times the mass of our Sun, the cluster was nicknamed "El Gordo" - "the Fat One" in Spanish.
Astronauts would also be bombarded with solar energetic particles, which get accelerated close to the sun as a result of solar flares and coronal mass ejections that shoot portions of the sun into space.
Sun Microsystems invented the Java language and started a mass exodus of computer programming talent away from Microsoft toward Sun.
This past weekend saw a particularly stunning display following a phenomenon known as a coronal mass ejection, where the sun spews a burst of particles into space that reach Earth one to three days later.
An eruption of hot plasma from the sun, called a coronal mass ejection, which could do damage to electricity grids over an entire continent, might fit the bill.
ECONOMIST: Disasters are about people and planning, not nature��s pomp
Flares are associated with huge eruptions of matter from the Sun's atmosphere - known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs).
Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church is best known through events like its mass weddings, where thousands of couples are married at the same time, having only just met their lifetime partner.
应用推荐