How Big is the Sun?

The Sun is really really big!

It is difficult to get a true feel for how big it is because nothing in our daily life comes even close.

But we can use objects that we are familiar with to provide us with a scale that can allow us to at least see how big the Sun is compared to the Earth and the other planets in our solar system.  If you think of the Sun as a basketball, the Earth would only be the size of the head of a pin.

The scale of the Sun and the planets is shown by representing the Sun as a basketball and showing the relative size of the the planets to that.

• If the Sun were a hallow ball, it would take about one million Earths to fill it.
• The Sun is 110 times wider than the Earth. So 110 Earths would fit across the diameter of the Sun.
• The mass of the Sun (the amount of stuff) is 330,000 times that of the Earth.
• The mass of the Sun accounts for 99.86% of the total mass (total amount of stuff) in the solar system.

The Sun observed by SDO on April 6, 2011 in 304 Angstrom light.

Zooming in on the 304 Angstrom image of the Sun to show the relative size of the Earth compared to the Sun and to a solar prominence on the Sun’s limb.

Learn more about the Sun »