Even minuscule specks of debris can cause serious damage to spacecraft and satellites because of the immense speeds at which they travel.
Infrared studies from spacecraft have revealed that Betelgeuse is surrounded by immense shells of material evidently shed by the star during episodes of mass loss over the past 100,000 years.
In 2008, NASA's Cassini spacecraft beamed back close-up images of these hotspots, revealing them to be immense cyclones, each as wide as the Earth.
Out of fuel but in a safe orbit, the spacecraft will drift through the solar system looking at nothing in particular as its immense trove of data continues to drive discoveries here on Earth.
That is until these words pierced the immense void of space: "Houston, we have a problem". Stranded 205,000 miles from Earth in a crippled spacecraft, astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert fight a desperate battle to survive.
This would take a lot of fuel to get the spacecraft rotating that fast, and the stresses that the ship would have to endure would be immense (meaning very heavy construction that'd need to be lifted into space).
The immense misshapen sun in a 1996 acrylic-and-crayon work by the South African Garth Erasmus suggests a hovering alien spacecraft sent to burn Earth to cinders.
Make it "its spacecraft".
