Compared to Earth, the Sun is enormous! It contains 99.86% of all of the mass of the entire Solar System. The Sun is 864,400 miles (1,391,000 kilometers) across. This is about 109 times the diameter of Earth. The Sun weighs about 333,000 times as much as Earth. It is so large that about 1,300,000 planet Earths can fit inside of it. Earth is about the size of an average sunspot!
It’s possible that the sun is even larger than previously thought. Xavier Jubier, an engineer and solar eclipse researcher, creates detailed models of solar and lunar eclipses to determine precisely where the moon’s shadow would fall during the solar eclipse. But when he matched actual photos and historical observations with the models, he found precise eclipse shapes only made sense if he scaled up the sun’s radius by a few hundred kilometers.
Even missions like NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and measurements of the inner planets across the face of the sun don’t refine the star’s radius as precisely as desired.
Credit : Space.com
Picture Credit : Google
