supergiant

American  

[soo-per-jahy-uhnt] / ˈsu pərˌdʒaɪ ənt /

noun

1. Astronomy. supergiant star.

2. an extremely large or powerful person, company, thing, etc.

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adjective

1. extremely large; immense.

supergiant British  

/ ˈsuːpəˌdʒaɪənt /

noun

1. any of a class of extremely large and luminous stars, such as Betelgeuse, which have expanded to a large diameter and are eventually likely to explode as supernovae Compare giant star white dwarf

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supergiant Scientific  

/ so̅o̅′pər-jī′ənt /

1. A star that is larger, brighter, and more massive than a giant star, being thousands of times brighter than the Sun and having a relatively short lifespan—only about 10 to 50 million years as opposed to around 5 billion years for the Sun. Supergiants, such as Betelgeuse and Rigel in Orion, are only found in young cosmic structures such as the arms of spiral galaxies. Red supergiants such as Betelgeuse are late-stage stars, having burned most of their hydrogen in an earlier stage as main-sequence stars, and now fuse helium into heavier elements through the triple alpha process. Blue supergiants such as Rigel are thought to have evolved from red giants, though some are considered main-sequence stars. Supergiants are thought to eventually undergo a supernova, ending up as neutron stars or black holes.

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Etymology

Origin of supergiant

First recorded in 1925–30; super- + giant

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

supergiant

SN 2024ggi began as a red supergiant with a mass between 12 and 15 times that of the Sun and a radius 500 times larger.

From Science Daily ● Nov. 16, 2025

"The infrared wavelengths of our observations overlap with an important silicate dust feature that's characteristic of some red supergiant spectra," Kilpatrick said.

From Science Daily ● Oct. 9, 2025

When combined with archival observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, the data revealed that the blast originated from a massive red supergiant star wrapped in an unexpected blanket of dust.

From Science Daily ● Oct. 9, 2025

The most familiar example of a red supergiant is Betelguese, the bright reddish star in the shoulder of the constellation Orion.

From Science Daily ● Oct. 9, 2025

The supergiant is an unlikely source of X-rays, and it is tempting to identify the companion inferred in visible light with the source detected in X-ray light.

From "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan