Ripley's Believe It or Not by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for November 12, 2015

Does Boggs still eat chicken when watching a Red Sox game although he’s no longer on the team?

It’s kind of hard to argue with Wade’s superstitions.

Ive made a few trips to the moon myself. But they turned out to be blotter acid flashbacks.

Cheetahs’ use their claws like cleats on sport shoes. Gives them better traction during those speedy sprints while hunting food.

Is the number of suns that can fit inside Vy Canis Majoris calculated by the total volume of all those suns?

Or, is it by the number of smaller spheres that can fit inside a large hollow sphere?

Since a star with >3 solar masses in its last days usually becomes a type II supernova, can you even begin to imagine what kind of black hole Canis Majoris could possibly become? Let alone the size of the explosion…

(It’s a good thing that in space no one can hear you go boom)

I think that there is an error in the claim that over nine billion of our Suns could fit inside VY Canis Majoris. The item mentions that it is “one of the largest stars known to men.” The star that is believed to be the largest is referred to as “UY Scuti” — i.e., star “UY” in the Shield (Scutum) constellation (more than 9,000 light-years from Earth) — which has an estimated diameter of one and a half billion miles! Meanwhile, our “little” Sun has a diameter of only about 865,000 miles — a distance that quite a few people have driven their cars in a lifetime. Star UY Scuti is so gigantic that about five billion copies of our Sun could fit inside it. (That’s why I said that the figure of over nine billion for VY Canis Majoris is in error.) It is believed that, if UY Scuti could be placed at the center of our Solar System, its outer shell would reach all the way to the orbit of Jupiter. Pondering such numbers as these can help us to appreciate how gigantic the Universe is — and how much greater still is its omnipresent, almighty Creator (even though He knows and loves each of us personally)!

Luckily the VY canis majoris is too far to effect us when it hypernovas (explodes). It’s 4,900 light years away according to an article I read.