Bigger than your brain wants
How Big Is the Sun?
A million Earths would fit inside the Sun, and it is still an ordinary star.
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Step 1 of 5
Line up Earths across it.
You would need 109 Earths side by side to span the Sun's face. That is a row of planets stretching over a million kilometres.
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Step 2 of 5
Filling it up is far worse.
Width grows once. Volume grows three times over. Doubling a ball's width makes it eight times bigger inside. At 109 times the width, the Sun could swallow about 1.3 million Earths.
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Step 3 of 5
It holds almost all the matter around here.
Add every planet, moon, asteroid and comet together and you get 0.2% of the solar system. The Sun is the other 99.8%.
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Step 4 of 5
It only looks small because it is far.
The Sun is 150 million kilometres away. Distance shrinks it to a disc you can cover with your thumb.
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Step 5 of 5
And it is a perfectly ordinary star.
Among stars the Sun is middling. Betelgeuse is so vast that if you put it where the Sun is, it would swallow Mars.
Sunlight takes 8 minutes 20 seconds to reach you. You always see the Sun as it was, never as it is.
The short version
109 Earths would span the Sun's face and 1.3 million would fill it, and even so it holds 99.8% of all the matter in the solar system. Among stars it is middling — Betelgeuse in its place would swallow Mars.
Try it yourself
Put a poppy seed next to a large grapefruit. That is Earth next to the Sun, roughly to scale.