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So how big is the Sun?
Found this link a long time ago, and had it saved for one of my Who Knew posts. As I haven't posted to this series in a while, thought it about damn time! So how big is the sun? Check out this well written article:
http://www.universetoday.com/2008/04/06/what-is-the-biggest-star-in-the-universe/
Our sun is 870,000 miles across, with an Equatorial Radius of 432,200 miles. That is super hard to imagine, so to give some context to the number, Earth is nearly 8,000 miles across, with an Equatorial Radius of a mere 3,963.19 miles.
The article above also mentions that you could fit one million planet Earths inside the sun! What got me about the article above are the comparisons between our Sun and a few other- even larger suns. He briefly writes that Eta Carina is so massive, its unclear where the surface of the sun stops and its solar wind begins. At 100 times more massive than our sun, and 4 million times brighter, its hard to fathom just how powerful such a star is.
But wait, Eta Carina is small compared to VY Canis Majoris. This sun is so massive that if it were our sun in our solar system, its size would extend out past the orbit of Saturn- thats about 2,100 times larger than our sun, thats a whopping 1,827,000,000 miles!
So really, our sun, the heavyweight of our solar system (which accounts for 98% of the overall mass in our solar system) is really quite the light-weight! No pun intended!
Another source for this post was found here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080101043829/solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Earth&Display=Facts&System=Metric
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