Original photo by Lenstravelier/ Unsplash

From 93 million miles away, it can be easy to forget just how big the sun is. With a diameter of 864,938 miles and a circumference of about 2,715,396 miles, the brilliant ball of hydrogen and helium at the center of our solar system is large enough to fit about 1 million Earths inside of it. It’s also some 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit on the surface and, thanks to nuclear reactions, 27 million degrees in its core, producing the same amount of energy every second as 100 billion tons of dynamite.

The sun is yellow.

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Though it appears that way to us, it would be more accurate to say that the sun is all colors mixed together — which, if anything, makes it closer to white. It appears yellow to us because of the way our atmosphere scatters blue and red light.

Don’t let that give you Earthlings an inferiority complex, however — in about 5 billion years, the sun will run out of hydrogen, and eventually collapse into a white dwarf roughly the same size as the Earth. (Earth won’t survive that, but luckily we don’t need to worry about it for quite some time.) In the meantime, the sun will remain almost unfathomably larger than anything orbiting it — about 1,000 Jupiters could fit inside it, for instance, as could 64.3 million of Earth’s moons.

Numbers Don't Lie

Numbers Don't Lie

Percent of all mass in the solar system the sun accounts for
99.8
Days in a year on Earth, which is why leap years exist
365.2564
Minutes it takes for light from the sun to reach Earth (on average)
8.3
Diameter, in light-years, of the observable universe
92 billion

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The sun is a ______ star.

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The sun is a yellow dwarf star.

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Some stars are hundreds of times larger than the sun.

Though the sun is obviously massive from our earthbound perspective, it’s not especially large in the (very) grand scheme of things. In fact, it’s fairly average. The sun pales in comparison to Betelgeuse (no relation to the Michael Keaton character), a red giant that’s approximately 700 times larger and 14,000 times brighter. Because it’s 724 light-years away from us, however, Betelgeuse is only around the 10th-brightest star in our night sky. If you want to feel really small, there are a number of videos showing the relative sizes of different heavenly bodies that may just leave your head spinning.

Michael Nordine
Staff Writer

Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.