Our solar system is made up of the sun and all the objects that orbit around it:  8 planets, some dwarf planets, a bunch of asteroids, comets, meteoroids and 181 moons orbiting the planets and dwarf planets. Lots of stuff.  Even given all that stuff, the sun is so massive that it’s mass accounts for 99.8% of all the mass in the solar system.

The sun’s mean diameter is 864,938 miles and its circumference is about 2,713,406 miles. About 1 million Earths could fit inside the sun. That is really big!

The sun is classified as a “yellow dwarf star” which means it is a medium sized star.  There are stars over 100 times as big in diameter as the sun.

The sun, and thus our entire solar system, orbits the galactic core of the Milky Way, which is 25,000 light years away.  25,000 light years is really far – 1.44^17 miles. Even though the solar system is moving fast  – an average velocity of 450,000 miles per hour – it takes our solar system about 230 million  years to complete a full orbit of the galactic core.

The sun is about 93 million miles from the Earth. It takes a photon (light) created by the sun about 8 minutes 20 seconds to reach Earth.

The sun is hot: the surface is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit and the core is about 27 million degrees Fahrenheit.

It takes hundreds of thousands of years for a photon created in the sun’s core to reach the surface of the sun and be emitted outward.

The sun is a relatively young star at 4.6 billion years old. The sun is expected to stay as it is for about another 5 billion years, after which it will expand to become a red giant (engulfing the earth) and then collapse to be a white dwarf star – very dense and hot and about the size of Earth.

The sun is Losing Weight: http://www.theifod.com/the-sun-is-losing-weight/

Everything you need to know about the sun in a single song: