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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.

The Sun109 Earths wideJupiter11 Earths wideEarth1
And that is only the width. By volume it is a million.

  1. Step 1 of 5

    Line up Earths across it.

    Twelve Earths in a rowNine more rows like thisto cross the Sun

    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.

  2. Step 2 of 5

    Filling it up is far worse.

    Across 109 EarthsInside 1,300,000 Earths
    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.

  3. Step 3 of 5

    It holds almost all the matter around here.

    The Sun — 99.8%everything elseis a roundingerrorJupiter — 0.1%the biggestleftoverEverything else — 0.1%includingus

    Add every planet, moon, asteroid and comet together and you get 0.2% of the solar system. The Sun is the other 99.8%.

  4. Step 4 of 5

    It only looks small because it is far.

    1.4 million kmwide Looks tiny from150 million km

    The Sun is 150 million kilometres away. Distance shrinks it to a disc you can cover with your thumb.

  5. Step 5 of 5

    And it is a perfectly ordinary star.

    Betelgeuseabout 700x theSunThe Sun1A small red dwarfa tenth of theSun

    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

The Sun could hold over a million Earths — and it is still just an average star.

Try it yourself

Put a poppy seed next to a large grapefruit. That is Earth next to the Sun, roughly to scale.

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