BIG. No, bigger than that. Seriously, it’s almost unimaginably big.
It’s made of hydrogen and helium, the two smallest and lightest elements. And yet the Sun is 99% of the mass of the Solar System. All the rock of the Earth, Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the asteroids, PLUS all of the gas of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, PLUS the ice of all of the comets and Kuyper Belt objects, including Pluto and Eris, is only a measly 1%.
You could fit 1.3 million Earths inside it.
It’s 4.4 million km in circumference. The average human walks at about 4.4 km per hour, so it would take you 1 million hours to walk around it. That’s 41,667 days. That’s 114 years, nonstop 24/7 walking.
The Sun sometimes sends out huge bursts of material, called solar prominences. Here’s a nice one.
But how big is this compared to the Earth?
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