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What is the size of the Sun?
Question Date: 2014-09-03
Answer 1:

The sun is a sphere (3D circle) so there are a few ways to describe how big it is. One of the most useful is probably the diameter which you can think of as the distance from the north pole to the south pole. The diameter of the sun is about 860,000 miles which is about 110 times longer than the Earth's diameter. This means that if you tied 110 Earths together like in a pearl necklace, it would be as long as the sun's diameter. In general, when a sphere has a longer diameter, it has a much larger volume. That larger volume means you could fit over a million Earths inside a hollowed out sun! To visualize this, imagine a small marble which is Earth. By comparison, the sun would be a ball that stretches from the floor to the ceiling of an average room. Interestingly enough, as large as the sun is, its only a medium sized star. There are stars that have a diameter that is over 500 times larger than the diameter of the sun!


Answer 2:

The Sun is very large. It is 100 times wider than the Earth (almost a million miles wide), and over 300 000 times as heavy as the Earth! If you want to compare volumes, it's over a million times as big!



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