Oversized stars

[Eric Nelson]

It's been quite a while since I was last active here.

In the Rosette Nebula, out of all the known stars that were calculated, some show radii larger than any star we ever found and measured.

For example, stars like HIP 500034 show radii of 2,700 X Sol's.
And others like HIP 500053 show radii of 3,100 X Sol's.

No star as far as we ever found, know of, or understand (even today) is as large as those (which we've also calculated).
For instance, UY Scuti's best estimated radius is 1,708 +/- 192 solar radii (though the unfortunately unreliable GAIA 2 Database showed 755 solar radii as a result of astrometric noise overdose - which GAIA 3 also has).
Yet Stephenson 2-18's sole calculation based off of its bolometric luminosity (nearly 440,000 solar luminosities) and an estimated effective temperature of 3,200 K shows no more than 2,150 solar radii, which's pushing the theoretical limits as far as we know, but still smaller than the radii of those Rosette nebula stars shown.
The largest star we characterized realistically is VY Canis Majoris, which's only 1,420 +/- 120 solar radii.

It's one thing to calculate from what we understand and know, but it's another thing to break the physics as we know.
The theoretical limit for stellar radii is 1,500 solar radii (which VY Canis Majoris is well within).

It's said there may have been stars long ago called quasi-stars (powered by black hole cores) measuring up to 9 1/3 x the 1,500 solar radii limit for the stars we have and understand, but they're only hypothetical and not guaranteed to have existed, therefore we can't rely on whether or not they ever existed.
Just saying.

[SevenSpheres]

These are fictional stars from a very old addon. It's possible that improvements could be made to Celestia's stellar radius calculation, but if you put implausible data in you'll get implausible data out. The best way to get plausible stellar radii is to define the radius in the stc file. There definitely shouldn't be an arbitrary cap on stellar radii (or anything else).