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The
Sun is very big compared to the Earth. If you made a model to
compare their sizes with the Earth being 1mm in diameter, the Sun would need to
be 11cm. The Sun is quite a big star compared to most stars.
The commonest stars are called red dwarfs. On the scale of our model, red dwarfs
are about 2.5cm in diameter.
But
there are some giant stars that make our enormous Sun look tiny.
Betelgeuse ( properly pronounced betel (like petal) jerz (like the first part of
jersey) but its much more fun to call it beetle juice!) is absolutely
unbelievably, colossally, huge. In our model it would be 55m in
diameter. If you stuck it in the middle of our solar system it would
span a distance of more than twice the Earth's orbit around the Sun.
So we would be deep inside it.

Despite
being a long way away (430 light years), Betelgeuse was the first star,
other than the Sun, that astronomers managed to see as a disk rather than a
point. The Hubble Space Telescope image below indicates that
the outer atmosphere of the star may extend beyond the distance of Jupiter's
orbit around the Sun. There is some radio telescope evidence that it
could extend to the orbit of Saturn. That would but its diameter at 2.7
billion kilometres! In our model with an 11cm ball for the Sun we
would require a sphere 214m in diameter for Betelgeuse. To add to
the amazing star's weirdness it is a very variable star, changes its visible
brightness significantly over just a few years. Researchers believe
that the physical processes that cause this are making the star pulsate,
changing its diameter by as much as 60%.

A Hubble Space Telescope view of Betelgeuse
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