supergiant

[ soo-per-jahy-uhnt ]

noun

1. Astronomy. supergiant star.
2. an extremely large or powerful person, company, thing, etc.

adjective

1. extremely large; immense.

supergiant

/ ˈsuːpəˌdʒaɪənt /

noun

1. any of a class of extremely large and luminous stars, such as Betelgeuse, which have expanded to a large diameter and are eventually likely to explode as supernovae Compare giant star white dwarf

supergiant

/ so̅o̅′pər-jī′ənt /

1. A star that is larger, brighter, and more massive than a giant star, being thousands of times brighter than the Sun and having a relatively short lifespan—only about 10 to 50 million years as opposed to around 5 billion years for the Sun. Supergiants, such as Betelgeuse and Rigel in Orion, are only found in young cosmic structures such as the arms of spiral galaxies. Red supergiants such as Betelgeuse are late-stage stars, having burned most of their hydrogen in an earlier stage as main-sequence stars, and now fuse helium into heavier elements through the triple alpha process. Blue supergiants such as Rigel are thought to have evolved from red giants, though some are considered main-sequence stars. Supergiants are thought to eventually undergo a supernova, ending up as neutron stars or black holes.

Word History and Origins

Origin of supergiant¹

First recorded in 1925–30; super- + giant

Example Sentences

Some of the stars seen in this image, belonging to the surrounding galaxy, are red supergiants -- stars that are cool but very large, hundreds of times the diameter of our Sun.

From Science Daily

The explosion was of a huge star, 20 times the mass of our Sun, a so-called blue supergiant.

From BBC

The star is Betelgeuse, a red supergiant in the constellation Orion.

From Seattle Times

One of the closest candidates of this size is the red supergiant Betelgeuse in the constellation of Orion, located at a safe distance of about 150 parsecs from our solar system.

From Science Daily

“We think it was quite a complicated merger,” Shenar says—one that possibly involved a helium-rich lower mass star spiraling into the puffy stellar atmosphere of an accompanying red supergiant.

From Scientific American