Scale Comparison

Sun vs Proxima Centauri

Explore the scale

The Sun's diameter is about 6.5 times Proxima Centauri's.

Shared physical scale
912,010km
Proxima Centauri215,000 km
Sun1.39 million km
Embed

The Sun is about 6.5 times the diameter of Proxima Centauri, the nearest known star beyond it.

Proxima has only about one-eighth of the Sun’s mass and radiates far less visible light. Red dwarfs like it are nevertheless the most common kind of star in the Milky Way.

Objects

Object details and sources

Stars

Proxima Centauri

215,000 kmdiameter

Proxima Centauri is the nearest known star to the Sun, just over four light-years away. ESA describes it as a flare star prone to dramatic brightening, yet because it burns fuel so slowly it may remain on the main sequence for another four trillion years.

Object class
M-type red dwarf star
Mass
~0.12 solar masses
Host
Alpha Centauri system
Estimated age
~4.8 billion years
Composition
Hydrogen and helium
Temperature
~3,000 K surface
Visual creditscaleofspace.org / CC BY-NC 4.0
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

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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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