How small is the Earth next to the Sun?

Although it is the largest object in the Solar System, the Sun is only average in size compared to the rest of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

Located 149.6 million km from Earth, the Sun is made up of molten plasma intertwined with electromagnetic fields, with a surface temperature of up to 5,505 degrees Celsius. Most life on Earth can exist and develop over billions of years thanks to the Sun.

How big is the sun?

The Sun is almost a perfect sphere. Its equatorial and polar diameters differ by only 10 km. The Sun's mean radius is 696,000 km and its diameter is about 1.392 million km. According to NASA, you could fit 109 Earths across the Sun's surface.

According to NASA solar scientist C. Alex Young, if the Sun were hollow, it would take about a million Earths to fill it. Meanwhile, if the Earth were hollow, it would only take about 50 Moons to fill it.

The total mass of the Sun is 1.989 x 1030 kg, about 333,000 times the mass of the Earth. In terms of size, if the Sun were the size of a basketball, the Earth would be the size of a match head.

The size of the Earth and the Moon when placed next to the Sun. (Photo: Mehmet Ergün)

Although it lies at the center of the Solar System and is the largest object in the Solar System, the Sun is only a medium-sized star among hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way. For example, Betelgeuse, a red giant star, is 700 times larger and 14,000 times brighter than the Sun.

"We've found stars that are 100 times the diameter of the Sun. They're really big ," NASA said on its SpacePlace website. But there are also stars that are just one-tenth the size of the Sun.

According to NASA experts, the size of the Sun may be much larger than the numbers previously published because humans have not been able to accurately measure this star .

NASA researcher Ernie Wright told Space that measuring the Sun is not as simple as you think, it is not as simple as placing a ruler on satellite images and coming up with a number. Even using the movements of Mercury and Venus to measure it is not necessarily the desired result.

The Sun and the Earth

The Sun is classified as a G-type main sequence star, or G dwarf, or more inaccurately, a yellow dwarf . In reality, the Sun—like other G-type stars—is white, but appears yellow in Earth's atmosphere.

Size of the planets in the Solar System.

Stars tend to get bigger as they 'age'. According to NASA, in about 5 billion years, scientists think the Sun will start to use up all the hydrogen in its core, at which point it will gradually turn into a red giant and expand its orbit even further than it does now.

By running computer simulations, scientists discovered that instead of fading and gradually disappearing as previously speculated, after death, the Sun will turn into a beautiful planetary nebula that can be clearly seen for millions of light years.

While the Earth may survive the death of the Sun, life on the planet will be extinguished long before that. As the Sun ages, it will become increasingly brighter, and in two billion years it could become hot enough to boil Earth's oceans.

If Earth still had inhabitants at that time, they would have to consider migrating to another planet, such as Mars, which would have become warmer thanks to the Sun's explosion.