Scale Comparison

Sun vs Betelgeuse

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Betelgeuse's quoted photospheric diameter is about 755 times the Sun's.

Shared physical scale
688million km
Sun1.39 million km
Betelgeuse1.05 billion km
Embed

Betelgeuse is a red supergiant with an approximate photospheric diameter hundreds of times the Sun’s.

Betelgeuse has no solid edge: its measured diameter changes with wavelength and as its extended atmosphere pulsates. The value here is an approximate photospheric size, not a permanently fixed boundary.

Objects

Object details and sources

Stars

Sun

1.39 million kmdiameter

The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System and the source of almost all the energy reaching its planets. It fuses about 600 million metric tons of hydrogen each second, and energy released in the core takes on the order of 100,000 years to work its way out to the visible surface.

Object class
G-type main-sequence star
Mass
~333,000 Earth masses
Temperature
5,772 K surface
Estimated age
~4.6 billion years
Composition
Hydrogen and helium
Visual creditSolar Dynamics Observatory 2024 / NASA / SDO / HMI science team / Public domainSource: Wikimedia Commons
Stars

Betelgeuse

1.05 billion kmdiameter

Betelgeuse is a red supergiant nearing the end of its stellar life. Its dramatic dimming in 2019 and 2020 turned out to be caused by a dusty veil ejected from the star, giving astronomers a rare direct look at how giant stars shed material into space.

Object class
Red supergiant star
Mass
~15–20 solar masses
Temperature
~3,600 K surface
Estimated age
~8–14 million years
Composition
Hydrogen and helium
Visual creditscaleofspace.org / CC BY-NC 4.0

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Scale of Space is a scroll-based journey through the universe, placing objects on a single logarithmic scale so you can compare size across an unbroken range.

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