Exactly How Big Is The Sun?

Look at the Sun.  Now look at me.  Can you see me?  No.  You are blind.  Because you looked at the Sun.  Never look at the Sun.  I’m on a horse.

So how big is the Sun?  Short answer.  BIG!

Slightly longer answer.  It has a diameter of 1,391,980 kilometers. That’s 109 times the size of the Earth’s diameter of 12,756 kilometers.  It’s also 1,300,000 times the volume of the Earth.

It’s still really hard to determine the sheer immensity of the Sun from mere figures, though.  Phil Plait points us to another way to measure the Sun.  The light from the point of the Sun that is closest to us gets to Earth 2.5 seconds faster than the light from the edge of the Sun.  Put another way, the Sun is so large that light from the edge of the sun takes 2.5 seconds to travel one radius length of the Sun!  Yowza!