Sun weight

How wide is the sun?

The Sun is 875,000 miles across, though scientists usually use kilometers, in which case it is 1,392,000 kilometers across. It is also very heavy. To write its weight in kilograms (1kg = 2 pounds, more or less) you write 2 followed by 30 zeros!


how much does the sun weigh?

The Sun is about 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg (a 2 with 30 zeros kg, or about 4.4 with 30 zeros lbs). Maybe you learned in your physics class what's the difference between weight and mass. For example a person of 50 kg weighs 50 kg on Earth, 8.3 on the moon, and 1354 on the Sun.



How big around is the Sun?

The radius of the Sun is about 700,000 km (435,000 miles). As you know the circumference of a circle is 2 pi r, where r is the radius. That makes 4.4 million kilometers (2.7 million miles) for the circumference. For comparison, the circumference of the Earth is about 40,000 km (25,000 miles), about 100 times smaller than the Sun.


How heavy is the sun?

The Sun has a mass of 2*10^30 kg, that is about 300,000 times greater than the mass of the Earth. Mass depends on the amount of matter in an object. Weight on the other hand, varies with respect to local gravity, however the Sun is not sitting near anyones gravitational field.


How many of earth's moon would fit inside the sun if it were hollow? ?

Well, the radius of the moon is about 1,080 miles, and the radius of the Sun is about 432,687 miles. The moon and the sun are both spheres, and math tells us how to relate the volume inside a sphere to its radius. I don't know how much math you have done, so let me just tell you the answer and you can maybe ask your teacher for more information. The answer is that you could get about 64.3 million moons inside the Sun if it were hollow.


How many saturn's could you fit inside the sun?

Almost 1600 Saturns would fit inside the Sun.


How do you determine the size of the Sun? Is our Sun the biggest?

We know the 'angular' size of the Sun - how big it is looks to be on the sky - in degrees (it's about half a degree). We can convert that into a physical size for how big it is in miles or kilometers, only by knowing how far away it is. (for example, the moon and the sun look about the same size to us on Earth but the moon is much closer so it must be smaller) If you multiply the angular size (in radians, which is another unit of angle) by the distance then you get the diameter.
How far away the Sun is is determined by a couple of methods. One is a direct measurement of its distance by bouncing a radio wave off it (radar), but this is not such a good method as the Sun's outer atmosphere scatters the waves. So the more reliable method is to combine what we know about the way the Sun's gravity makes planets move (Kepler's Laws of planetary motion), with observations of the planets' movements and radar measurements of distances to the planets, to work out the distance to the Sun. This is an indirect way of getting the distance but very accurate since it is easier to measure the distance to a planet with radar, and there are several planets which you can usefully use to make independent calculations.

Voyager 1

1. This artist's concept depicts NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft entering interstellar space, or the space between stars. Interstellar space is dominated by the plasma, or ionized gas, that was ejected by the death of nearby giant stars millions of years ago. The environment inside our solar bubble is dominated by the plasma exhausted by our sun, known as the solar wind. The interstellar plasma is shown with an orange glow similar to the color seen in visible-light images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope that show stars in the Orion nebula traveling through interstellar space. Image released Sept. 12, 2013. 

Jupiter magnetic field

1. The magnetosphere of Jupiter is the cavity created in the solar wind by the planet's magnetic field. Extending up to seven million kilometers in the Sun's direction and almost to the orbit of Saturn in the opposite direction, Jupiter's magnetosphere is the largest and most powerful of any planetary magnetosphere in the Solar System, and by volume the largest known continuous structure in the Solar System after the heliosphere. Wider and flatter than the Earth's magnetosphere, Jupiter's is stronger by an order of magnitude, while its magnetic moment is roughly 18,000 times larger. The existence of Jupiter's magnetic field was first inferred from observations of radio emissions at the end of the 1950s and was directly observed by the Pioneer 10 spacecraft in 1973.