ExploraTour: A Peek into the Lives of the Stars


The Size of Things

How big are stars? Let's start with something close to home. Our sun is a star. To get an idea of just how big the sun is, let's compare it to the Earth.

The Earth looks pretty big -- it has oceans, mountains, very big cities. But as big as the Earth is, the sun could hold about 1 million 300 thousand Earth's inside of it.

So the sun must be a very big star, right? Wrong... the sun is actually small as star's go.

Some stars are so big that the sun with our Earth and some of the other planets revolving around it would fit inside of them. On the other hand, the smallest stars are only about 3 times as big as the Earth.

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Windows to the Universe, a project of the National Earth Science Teachers Association, is sponsored in part is sponsored in part through grants from federal agencies (NASA and NOAA), and partnerships with affiliated organizations, including the American Geophysical Union, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Earth System Information Partnership, the American Meteorological Society, the National Center for Science Education, and TERC. The American Geophysical Union and the American Geosciences Institute are Windows to the Universe Founding Partners. NESTA welcomes new Institutional Affiliates in support of our ongoing programs, as well as collaborations on new projects. Contact NESTA for more information. NASA ESIP NCSE HHMI AGU AGI AMS NOAA