Which is Bigger the Earth or the Sun

At times, even the most simple question can lead you to the answers to some of the most intricate things of life, and explain a lot more than what you actually wanted to know. Amassing knowledge is never a bad thing, especially when it is about your own surroundings. While there may still be only a few people who may dare to question the fact that the Sun is bigger than the Earth in terms of size, not many of the rest of people can actually boast of knowing the exact size of these two astronomical objects.

The Earth and the Sun

The Sun is a star located at the center of the Solar System in the Milky Way galaxy. The eight planets of the Solar System revolve around the Sun, and planet Earth is just one of them. Also known as the Blue Planet, the Earth is the 5th largest planet in the Solar System, with a diameter of around 7926 miles (12,755 km). Though this number may make the planet look massive, it is negligible as compared to the Sun, which constitutes around 99.86 percent of the total mass of the Solar System. Add to it the fact that the Sun is just a medium-sized star, and there are several stars which are several times bigger than it, and you realizes that our planet is just a minute object in the Universe.

Which is Bigger?

Coming back to how big are Earth and Sun, let's get into the details of the size of these two. The equatorial radius of planet Earth is 6,378.1 km, while its polar radius is 6,356.8 km, which eventually amounts to a mean radius of 6,371.0 km. The equatorial radius of the Sun, on the other hand, is 6.955 × 10⁵ km, and therefore the mean diameter of the solar body amounts to a whopping 1.392 × 10⁶ km. Simply speaking, the diameter of the Sun is 864,938 miles, which makes it a 109 times bigger than Earth. Similarly, the volume of the Earth is 1.08321 × 10¹² km³, while the volume of the Sun is 1.412 × 10¹⁸ km³. Simply put, the volume of the Sun is 1,299,400 times bigger than the volume of the Earth. This, in turn, means that you can fit in around 1,300,000 Earths inside the Sun with ease.

Even though the Moon and the Sun appear to be of the same size to the naked eyes, the Sun is 400 times bigger than the Moon, which has a radius of 2,160 miles. It is the difference in distance between the Earth and the Sun (around 93,000,000 miles) and the same between the Earth and the Moon (238,857 miles) that makes both appear to be roughly of the same size.

At the end of the day the relative size of the Earth, Jupiter and the Sun can be represented as 1:10:100, which means that planet Jupiter is 10 times as big as the Earth, and the Sun is 100 times as big (109 times to be precise) as the Earth.