Mind Blown

The Earth fits into the Sunmore than a million times.

All life on Earth depends on light and energy from the Sun, that big ball of gas at the centre of our solar system. 

The Sun is heated by nuclear fusion. Inside its core, hydrogen nuclei continuously melt together to form helium nuclei, releasing vast quantities of energy. Away from the core, this energy is converted to light, which can take up to 100,000 years to escape. Weirdly enough, once that light has escaped the core, it takes only eight minutes to travel the 150 million kilometres to reach us!

Thinking about how powerful the Sun'seffects are here on Earth probably gives you an indication of its size. It's by far the largest object in our solar system, making up a ridiculous 99.8% of our total mass.

In fact, the Sun is so big you could fit more than a million Earths inside of it, 1.3 million to be exact!

The surface of the Sun is marked with small black dots, called sunspots, that are slightly cooler than the mind-blowingly hot 5500°C temperature of the overall surface. Sunspots range in size from 1500 to 50,000kilometres in diameter, bigger than Earth!

Don't forget, however, that the Sun is classified as a yellow dwarf star. As the name suggests, there are much huger stars out there in the universe.