I’ve always been told that massive stars undergo supernova events, while smaller ones like the sun just grow into red giants, to then just shrink back to a white dwarf. My point is: how do we know red supergiants aren’t just regular “Suns” that are just on their giant phase?
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Quite simply they don’t follow the pattern all the others do
For Mason sequence stars, more mass means the star is hotter. They range from small, cold, and red, up to big hot and blue. It makes a very clear trend.
Then you have the Giants or super Giants. They hang out on a clump all on their own. They are huge, super huge… But cold. And have the same mass as the hot blue stars.
This means they break the pattern, unlike the main sequence, they are cold, despite burnt very massive. This is how we know that they are fundamentally different from main sequence stars.
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