How Big is the Sun?

How Big is the Sun?

The sun has a volume of 1.4×10^27 cubic meters. That number doesn’t really look big, but if you wrote it down it would look like this:

1,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

The sun has a diameter of over 800 thousand miles, whereas the earth only has a diameter of seven thousand miles. The sun has over 300,000 times the mass of the earth and 1.3 million earths could fit inside the sun. The sun is 93 million miles away, meaning it takes eight minutes for light from the sun to reach the earth. If the sun were to instantly vanish, it would still look like it is in the sky for eight minutes because light is still traveling to earth.

The sun is huge compared to the moon, but it is so far away that it looks almost the same size as the moon to us. For comparison, the moon is only 200 thousand miles away.