red giant

nounAstronomy.

a star in an intermediate stage of evolution, characterized by a large volume, low surface temperature, and reddish hue.

Origin of red giant

First recorded in 1915–20

Words Nearby red giant

Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

How to use red giant in a sentence

When the sun eventually becomes a red giant, its radius will actually reach outwards to Earth’s current orbit.
Scientists Find the First Known Planet to Have Survived the Death of Its Star | Dimitri Veras | October 14, 2021 | Singularity Hub
The scientists hope to find more stars like the elderly red giant, which could reveal how frequent magnetorotational hypernovas are.
Souped-up supernovas may produce much of the universe’s heavy elements | Mara Johnson-Groh | July 7, 2021 | Science News
Using images from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers found SN 2018zd’s progenitor, which turned out to be an old red giant.
Astronomers just confirmed a new type of supernova | Monroe Hammond | June 29, 2021 | Popular-Science
By their hypotheses, a red giant would shed most of its mass before triggering its relatively small explosion.
Astronomers just confirmed a new type of supernova | Monroe Hammond | June 29, 2021 | Popular-Science
The speed of the winds and how quickly a red giant loses mass as it slowly dies also play a role in making those shapes.
Stellar winds hint at how planetary nebulae get their stunning shapes | Curtis Segarra | September 22, 2020 | Science News

The red giant had the advantage in height, if not in weight; the black giant in strength of muscle, if not in suppleness of limbs.
Burl | Morrison Heady
There was the fleck of white high up near the top of the red giant, its white-dwarf companion in transit.
Earthsmith | Milton Lesser
Roger de Conde spoke no English, and yet she had plainly heard English words upon this man's lips as he addressed the red giant.
The Outlaw of Torn | Edgar Rice Burroughs
Nevertheless, he brought the car to anchor without a second's hesitation, drawing up alongside the humiliated red giant.
My Friend the Chauffeur | C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
But the question as to how the red giant stars were formed has received less satisfactory and precise answers.
The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) | J. Arthur Thomson

British Dictionary definitions for red giant

red giant

noun

a giant star towards the end of its life, with a relatively low temperature of 2000–4000 K, that emits red light

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Scientific definitions for red giant

red giant

A giant star that has a relatively low surface temperature, giving it a reddish or orange hue. Red giants are non-main-sequence stars positioned in the upper right of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. They are not massive stars but rather late, expanded stages of lower-mass main-sequence stars that have exhausted the hydrogen in their core and are fusing their remaining hydrogen into helium in a luminous outer shell. The Sun is expected to become a red giant in about 5 billion years, expanding to 70 times its current size and bringing its surface extremely close to Earth's present orbit. See more at star. See Note at dwarf star.

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