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.
Scale Comparison
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
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.
Continue reading
Continue with another comparison or open the full scale.
About
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.
Guides explain selected parts of that range, while focused views filter the objects by subject.