Scale Comparison

Sun vs Rigel

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Rigel's diameter is about 74 times the Sun's.

Shared physical scale
67.5million km
Sun1.39 million km
Rigel103 million km
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Rigel is a hot blue supergiant about 74 times the Sun’s diameter.

Rigel combines a surface temperature near 12,000 kelvin with about 21 solar masses. Its large radius therefore belongs to a hot, massive evolved star rather than a cool red-supergiant envelope.

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

Rigel

103 million kmdiameter

Rigel is the blue-white supergiant that marks Orion’s foot. Although it looks like a single star to the eye, it is the luminous primary of a multiple-star system.

Object class
Blue supergiant star
Mass
~21 solar masses
Temperature
~12,000 K surface
Estimated age
~8 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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