Scale Comparison

Sun vs Polaris Aa

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Polaris Aa's diameter is about 46 times the Sun's.

Shared physical scale
42.2million km
Sun1.39 million km
Polaris Aa64.4 million km
Embed

Polaris Aa, the dominant star in the North Star system, is about 46 times the Sun’s diameter.

Polaris Aa is a pulsating Cepheid, so its radius and brightness vary over a cycle of about four days. The plotted diameter is a representative value, not a fixed solid 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

Polaris Aa

64.4 million kmdiameter

Polaris Aa is the yellow supergiant at the heart of the North Star system and the nearest classical Cepheid to Earth. Cepheids are standard candles for measuring cosmic distances, which makes this nearby example an important calibrator.

Object class
Yellow supergiant Cepheid star
Mass
~5.1 solar masses
Host
Polaris system
Estimated age
~45–67 million years
Composition
Hydrogen and helium
Temperature
~6,015 K surface
Visual creditscaleofspace.org / CC BY-NC 4.0

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