• Question: how big is the sun?

    Asked by mooncat101 to Robert, Aimee, Gemma, Hussain, Ross on 13 Nov 2015. This question was also asked by COOLCAMMY123, Daisy, 687tund33.
    • Photo: Hussain Jaffery

      Hussain Jaffery answered on 13 Nov 2015:

      The Sun is rather huge!

      It takes up space, or volume, equal to about 1.4 billion billion kilometres (0.9 billion billion miles) cubed – that’s 1.3 million times the space Earth takes up.

      The Sun is about 1.4 million kilometres (0.9 million miles) wide – you could fit 109 Earths end-to-end to get the same distance.

      In terms of mass, or how much stuff is in there, the Sun has about 2 million trillion trillion kilograms of stuff – that’s 333,000 times the mass of Earth.

      What is astonishing is that if you compare the Sun to the other stars in the Milky Way galaxy and the rest of the universe, it’s just below average!

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