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After poking around the ever-helpful Astronomy > Ask an Expert category of the Yahoo! Directory, we discovered that the largest known star, in terms of mass and brightness, is the dramatically dubbed Pistol Star. The Pistol Star is closer to the center of the Milky Way than we are, and isn't visible to the naked eye on account of galactic dust. It's about 100 times the size of our sun, and burns 10,000,000 times as bright. It's called the Pistol Star because it's believed to be the source of a giant nebula, or cloud of dust and gas. Recent pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope confirm this relationship. Originally, the
Pistol may have had 200 to 250 times more mass than our sun, before it "fired off" the majority of its mass into the galaxy. The brightest visible star in the night sky is Sirius in Canis Major, a constellation that represents one of Orion's hunting dogs. Ancient astronomers predicted warmer weather when Sirius appeared on the night sky, hence the "dog days" of summer.
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