The HyperGiant Star Dragon

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The final installment of the '2012 Planetary Dragon Series!' Presenting the HyperGiant Star Dragon!

(You guys see why I saved him for last, huh?)

Have you ever seen the animation files that show a person, then earth, then the sun, then star x, then star y, and so forth and it goes on for like 20 minutes, the last thing being a pixel next to the following thing? This guy here is the last thing on that list. Any comparison pics you look up will show a closeup and the sun the size of a pixel, maybe, next to it. These things a freaking enormous.

And it has to be with a name like 'hypergiant,' right? The first proposed name was actually 'super-supergiant.' Heh, heh. That sounds like something we'd come up with. The name is somewhat of a put-off - hypergiants aren't necessarily much larger than, say, supergiants in terms of diameter or whatever, but are bigger in terms of their mass. Y'know, for example, if you put a hyper and a super of the same 'size' into a bucket, the hyper would me more difficult to lift. It's like the whole 'Saturn can float in a bathtub' thing. You know what I'm talking about.

There are a few different 'types' of hypergiants, red, blue, and yellow, or you could be more specific and say cool or hot, the cool being red and yellow, and the hot being blue. The most hyper of these hypergiants are the hotter, bluer variety, in that they burn much more fuel and give out a much higher luminosity than their cooler counterparts, burning at several million times the brightness of our Sun as opposed to only half-a-million times our Sun. Only half-a-million times our Sun. Sheesh yellow and red hypergiants, pick up your game, get in the picture here.

Every sentence I type talking about how bright they are, I just want to emphasize that these are the stars that, like, burn your eyes through your eyelids. Boil your brains. You'd see it from a galaxy away and be like 'OH MY GOD, MY EYES, WTF?!' Like driving at night with a dirty windshield, only much worse. But literally, a galaxy away.

For how bright these guys are, they actually tend to be very short-lived, only living about a few million years compared stars like our Sun, which are said to live for 10 million and more years. You could say that these guys are like the 'extremists' of stars, in that they're born in the densest and most intense areas of star formation in nebulas, burn brighter than just about anything, and die suddenly. So they're born in turmoil, draw the most attention to themselves, and die out of the blue. Punks.

Now there's another thing that's interesting to note. These guys have a very close relationship with another type of star that I featured in the Series this year - remember the Wolf-Rayet Star Dragon? (Look him up if you don't.) Oftentimes, since these hypergiants are burning so much fuel so quickly, they're very often very, very close to the tipping point of having enough out-ward burning mass to counteract the inner-pulling force of gravity. This causes a lot of variation in the hyper's luminosity and behaviour, and sometimes they will just let out huge bursts of their outer layers. With each shedding of each layer, more fuel to burn is lost, and these 'sheddings' occur more often. More fuel is lost, more sheddings occur, you get the idea, until these hypers will actually turn into Wolf-Rayet Stars in the later parts of their life, constantly shedding their layers until they can't hold out against their own gravity and go supernova. Pretty cool, huh?

Due to the unstable nature of hypergiants and their relatively short galactic lives, they're actually pretty difficult to find. Of course, like I said before, if you can find one, it's usually from a galaxy away since they're so incredibly bright. But remember, space is huge. By the time we notice that light from the hypergiant, it may already have become a Wolf-Rayet star or gone supernova. Also, due to the nature of these stars and how huge the discrepancies between the hot and cool varieties are, we know of more blue (hot) hypers than red and yellow (cool) hypers.

And that's what I have to say about that.

To the dragon! You guys know how I love to really pimp out the massive star dragons with huge wings and crazy tails, and this guy is my favourite of them all, (so far, nya~!) Don't let his docile pose fool you! At any moment, he's ready to throw that core of light he's holding right into your face!
(Look at my change in shading styles from these pieces to my newer pieces.)

And that wraps up this year's Planetary Dragon Series. I do hope I can continue the series in 2013, granted the world doesn't end/how busy I end up being. I sometimes toy with the idea of doing a different kind of series, but the space dragons are just so much fun... Maybe I'll do two series next year, hah!

Enjoy!

The first series gallery folder: twilightsaint.deviantart.com/g…
The second series folder: twilightsaint.deviantart.com/g…
The third series folder: twilightsaint.deviantart.com/g…
This series folder:
twilightsaint.deviantart.com/g…

Enjoy!
Art/series (c) me.
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