Daily Fact: How many Earths could fit inside the sun?

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Original photo by Lenstravelier/ Unsplash About 1 million Earths could fit inside the sun. 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. 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.   The sun is yellow. The sun is yellow.

The sun is a __ star. The sun is a __ star. 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 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.   You might also like Why Is the Sky Blue? And Other Questions About the Sky Our atmosphere is a giant science fair, and once you start digging in, you'll find demonstrations of color waves, states of matter, and the speed of light. Here's an overview of some big questions about the sky above.

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