Biggest and smallest known star!?

Question

I want to know some information about the biggest and smallest known star,please.

Many thanks to those who answered my question but I mean mass not volume.

Answer 1

Here are the biggest ones

Star name Solar diameter
(Sun = 1)

VV Cephei 1900
V354 Cephei 1520
KW Sagitarii 1460
KY Cygni 1420
Mu Cephei (Herschel's "Garnet Star") 1420
La Superba (Y Canum Venaticorum) 1100
S Doradus 1000
V509 Cassiopeiae 910
R Leonis 900 [1]
R Doradus 830
V838 Monocerotis 800
V382 Carinae 747
Rho Cassiopeiae 738
Mira A (Omicron Ceti) 700
Betelgeuse (Alpha Orionis) 650
S Pegasi 580 [2]
T Cepheii 540 [3]
S Orionis 530 [4]
W Hydrae 520 [5]
Y1 Aurigae 511
Antares (Alpha Scorpii) 510
119 Tauri 510
R Cassiopeiae 500 [8]
Delta Canis Majoris (Wezen) 482
Chi Cygni 470 [9]
J Cassiopeiae 460
Alpha Herculis (Ras Algethi) 460
Eta Carinae 400
The Pistol Star 340
Chi Cygni 300
Epsilon Aurigae B 295
LBV 1806-20 200
Epsilon Aurigae A 175
Zeta Aurigae 160 [10]
Epsilon Pegasi (Enif) 150
Deneb (Alpha Cygni) 145
Gamma Crucis (Gacrux) 113
Beta Cygni A1 109
Epsilon Aurigae 100
Gamma Andromedae 83
Alpha Leporis (Arneb) 77
Rigel (Beta Orionis) 70
Epsilon Carinae 70
R Coronae Borealis 65
Canopus (Alpha Carinae) 65
Delta Orionis (Mintaka) 60
Zeta Orionis (Alnitak) 60
Alpha Persei (Mirfak) 60
Zeta Geminorum (Mekbuda) 60
Eta Aquilae 60
Beta Ursae Minoris (Kochab) 50
Gamma Draconis (Eltanin) 50
Aldebaran (Alpha Tauri) 43

Some of these are amongst the brightest stars in the sky and well-known therefore

Betelgeuse is 15th largest and 9th brightest
Antares is 21st largest and 16th brightest
Deneb is 36th largest and 19th brightest
Rigel is 42nd largest and 6th brightest
Canopus is 45th largest and 2nd brightest
Aldebaran is 53rd largest and 13th brightest

SMALLEST STAR

Tim Mason is quite right, We will always find one a bit smaller as we haven't catalogued and observed everything yet.

17 months ago this article appeared in NewScientist:

Planet search reveals smallest star ever
12:58 04 March 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Maggie McKee

The smallest star ever found (OGLE-TR-122b) is just slightly larger than Jupiter The smallest star ever detected has turned up in a search for extrasolar planets, a new study reveals. Astronomers say the find highlights the need to carefully confirm any "planet" detections made with future space missions.

The star was one of nearly 200 objects detected passing in front of - or transiting - brighter companion stars during the planet-hunting OGLE survey in Chile. Once every week, the tiny object, called OGLE-TR-122b, crosses in front of a Sun-like star called OGLE-TR-122, dimming the light reaching Earth by 1.5%.

That dimming allowed astronomers to precisely calculate the small object's size - it is just 16% larger than Jupiter. This is smaller than some known planets found beyond our solar system - or exoplanets.

But 122b's identity as a star was not revealed until a team led by Frederic Pont of Switzerland's Geneva Observatory observed 60 of these transiting objects more closely with the Very Large Telescope in Chile.

They used the telescope to study the spectrum of the larger star, which wobbles back and forth because of gravitational tugs from the smaller object. The relatively puny body weighed in at 96 times Jupiter's mass - above the threshold of 75 Jupiter-masses required for a bona fide star, which must also burn hydrogen.

"This is the first time we find a star that has a radius comparable to a planet," says team member Claudio Melo of the European Southern Observatory in Santiago, Chile.

Physical limit
The tiny star probably began its life as a stellar runt a few billion years ago - condensing from a relatively small clump of gas. But it is not the least massive star ever found. That claim goes to a star just 93 times Jupiter's mass (AB Doradus C, a companion to AB Doradus A) that was announced in January 2005 by a team led by Laird M Close of the University of Arizona, US. But that star does not pass in front of its larger companion star as seen from Earth, so its size is not known accurately.

But Melo says physics sets a limit - based on the degree to which matter can be crammed together - on the smallest star possible. "I don't think we are going to find stars whose radius is much smaller than those we are observing now," he says.

He hopes exoplanet surveys will soon turn up a transiting brown dwarf, a type of object that straddles the mass range between planets and stars. At between 13 and 75 times the mass of Jupiter, brown dwarfs are not massive enough to burn hydrogen like stars, but some observations hint they do not form like planets, from the dusty discs around stars.

A transiting brown dwarf would give a precise measurement of its mass and physical size. Says Melo: "It would be interesting to see if our understanding of the internal structure of brown dwarfs would be validated by observations."

NEUTRON STARS

A neutron star is one of the few possible endpoints of stellar evolution. A neutron star is formed from the collapsed remnant of a massive star after a Type II, Type Ib, or Type Ic supernova.

A typical neutron star has a mass between 1.35 to about 2.1 solar masses, with a corresponding radius between 20 and 10 km (they shrink as their mass increases) — 30,000 to 70,000 times smaller than the Sun. Thus, neutron stars have densities of 8×1013 to 2×1015 g/cm³, about the density of an atomic nucleus.

Compact stars of less than 1.44 solar masses, the Chandrasekhar limit, are white dwarfs; above three to five solar masses (the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit), gravitational collapse occurs, inevitably producing a black hole.

Answer 2

Smallest Known Star

Answer 3

List Of Well Known Stars

Answer 4

Betelgeuse (a well-known red giant in Orion) is pretty big, about 650 Solar Diameters compared to our sun. Brown dwarf stars which are less than 8% of our sun's mass are the smalles class of star there is,

But is there an individual star, which is the smallest brown dwarf? Yes there must be, but as it would be very faint and probably a long way off, would we know about it? There are roughly 70 sextillion stars in the universe (7 x 10^21) in roughly 10^11 galaxies so it seems likely that there would always be one smaller we haven't catalogued yet than any particular one you cared to name,

Answer 5

The smallest mass a star can have and still be a star is 0.08 times the mass of our Sun. (Our Sun's mass is 2x10^30 kg, that's a 2 with 30 zeros after it.) Anything with less mass than that will never start hydrogen fusion in its core, so it will never officially be a star. Things with less mass than 0.08 solar masses are called brown dwarfs, as they still glow warm due to heat generated from formation. There are many many many stars that are just above the brown dwarf limit, since low-mass stars are far more common than high-mass stars.

The largest a star can be is about 100 times the mass of the Sun. Any more massive, and its core will fuse hydrogen so rapidly that it will literally tear itself apart. One such star is nick-named the Pistol Star, as it is at the center of the Pistol Nebula (the nebula is actually some outer layers that the star has thrown off because it is so close to tearing itself apart). See this link for more info and a picture:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap971008.html
9 years ago, this was the most massive star known; they've probably found another since then.

Answer 6

This Site Might Help You.

RE:
Biggest and smallest known star!?
I want to know some information about the biggest and smallest known star,please.

Answer 7

Depending on whether you mean size or mass....

One of the largest (in physical size) stars is the red supergiant Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion. It has a diameter 500 to perhaps 750 times that of the Sun.
One of the most massive stars is the variable star called Eta
Carinae, with a mass of about 200 solar masses.
The Guiness Book of World Records lists a white dwarf named L362-81 as the smallest star in size; its diameter is estimated to be only about 3500 miles, or about the same size as the planet Mercury.
Of course, new information:
http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/jupiter_sized_star.html?332005
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050303_star_small.html
says that there are stars as small as large planets. (brown Dwarfs)
The star with the smallest mass (again, according to Guiness) is designated RG 0058.8-2807; its mass is only 0.014 solar mass (it is also the faintest known star).

For more information:

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/newton/askasci/1995/astron/AST163.HTM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star#Age_and_size_of_stars

Answer 8

They have answered you according to mass, not volume. A brown dwarf, for instance, is classified according to mass. A smaller mass is a planet, a huge gas giant similar to Jupiter, since we cannot see how all of these objects form.