About how big is the sun?

Our fiery sun looks no bigger than a penny in the sky. This is because it is more than 92 million miles away from us. But if the big star were hollow, it could swallow one and a third million planets as big as cur earth. Like the earth, the sun is a round ball. However, it is made entirely of seething gases.

A good way to measure a ball is by its diameter, which is a line straight through the middle from side to side. The diameter of the earth is almost 8,000 miles. The diameter of the sun is 864,000 miles. So we can say that the sun is about 109 times wider than the earth.