LBV 1806-20 is at least 5 million times brighter than the sun -- in the night sky. Dust particles between Earth and the star block out all of its visible light. Whereas the sun is located only 8.3 light minutes from Earth, the bright star is 45,000 light years away, on the other side of the galaxy.

Luminous blue variable stars are extremely large, with LBV 1806-20 probably at least 150 times larger than the sun. The stars are also extremely young by stellar time. LBV 1806-20 is estimated at less than 2 million years old. The sun in our solar system, by contrast, is 5 billion years old. Typical stars, such as the sun, live 10 billion years.

LBVs have “short and troubled lives,” as Eikenberry put it, because “the more mass you have, the more nuclear fuel you have, the faster you burn it up. They start blowing themselves to bits.”

All very informative, but what I find interesting is that the previous record holder, another of these "luminous blue variables" that have short lives and then blow up, the Pistol Star, can be found in the center of our galaxy, a spot where I expect the big nasty to come from in 2012, if a big nasty is what really hits us. More on the Pistol Star later.