Post by Radrook Admin on Jun 3, 2019 5:18:47 GMT -5
How Big and massive is our Sun?
Our sun doesn’t seem that big from our vantage point on Earth, does it? After all, we can easily blot it out with our hand just as we do the moon. But that’s possible only because it is 93 million miles away. which is a large distance. Even travelling at 186,000 miles per second it takes a full eight minutes for its light to reach us. In contrast, from the moon, light only takes two seconds to reach us. So naturally, from such a large distance the sun looks rather small in our sky, or the same size as our moon. Were we on Mercury, which is a mere 36 million miles from it, then the sun would dominates the sky in a very impressive way.
But no, the sun is definitely not small. Even though it is is classified as a yellow dwarf star, it is still impressive. Consider the following data:
Sun’s size and volume
1. If the sun were hollow we could fit 1.3 million flexible earths inside.
2. The sun has 333,000 times the mass of the Earth. In other words, you could make 333,000 spheres as massive as the Earth with the mass of the sun. Earth’s weight or mass, is 5.972 sextillion (1,000 trillion) metric tons, that’s 5,972,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons. Multiply that by 333,000 and you get the Sun’s mass.
3. The sun contains 99.8 percent of the mass of the entire solar system. In other words, the rest of our solar system, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Eris, Makemake and the rest of the dwarf planets, and all their moons, the asteroid belt, the Kuiper Belt, the Oort Cloud make up only 0.2 percent of the solar system’s mass. Or two-tenths of a percent while the sun makes up the rest.
4. The Sun is 109 times wider than the Earth. That means that it need to place 109 Earths side by side in order to span its diameter. Since Earth’s diameter is 7,926 miles, we would need to multiply that by 109 times to get the diameter of our Sun. That would give us a solar diameter of approx. 863,934 miles. Which means that traveling at 100 mph, it would take us 8,639.34 hours to traverse the sun at its equator or 359.97 days, which is approx. an entire year.
6. Even our largest planet Jupiter pales in comparison. The Sun could hold a thousand Jupiters inside and is ten times as wide. This is assuming a solid but malleable Jupiter that can be molded to get rid of spaces in between globes of course.