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Sun
Details
The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System and the engine behind every climate and orbit within it. It fuses about 600 million metric tons of hydrogen each second, while photons created in the core can take roughly 250,000 years to work their way to the visible surface.
The Sun is the object people think they know until they look more closely. It sits at the center of the Solar System, but it is not a calm ball hanging in space. It is a self-gravitating sphere of plasma, constantly changing under heat, radiation, and magnetism.
The visible surface is only the photosphere, with the chromosphere and corona layered above it. The Sun does not have a solid surface, and its rotation is not uniform: the equator spins faster than the poles. Add magnetic activity and you get sunspots, flares, and eruptions, along with the still-open puzzle of why the corona is hotter than the surface below.
What makes the Sun remarkable is not only that it gives us light and heat. Its gravity keeps the Solar System organized, and its energy shapes weather, climate, seasons, and auroras on Earth. The star that feels most familiar is also the one that sets the terms for everything around it.
516,806km
Key facts
- Category
- Stars
- Object class
- G-type main-sequence star
- Mass
- ~333,000 Earth masses
- Temperature
- 5,772 K surface
- Scale fact
- 1.39 million kmdiameter
- Estimated age
- ~4.6 billion years
- Composition
- Hydrogen and helium
Scale context
Where Sun sits on the full axis
By size on the journey, Sun sits between Epsilon Eridani and Sirius A. The band below uses nearby Stars objects for context.
Shared physical scale
6.76million km
Together, these objects make the size change around Sun easy to compare at a glance.
Between the smallest and the largest, perspective is everything.
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 turn parts of that scale into curated essays, while focused views let you explore the same range through specific groups of objects.