01Size214,000 kmDist4.24 lyTemp3,000 K (≈ 2,700 °C)
Proxima Centauri
The closest known star to the Sun — and still impossibly far.
StarRed dwarfCosmos
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NASA / SDO
The Sun Moon Distance from Earth
The Sun is roughly 389× farther from Earth than Moon.
Picture this
If the Sun were a basketball, Earth would be a peppercorn 26 metres away — and Pluto would be a dust mote a kilometre off.
If you scale the distance
Light from the Sun reaches Earth in 8 minutes 20 seconds. At airline speeds, the journey would take 19 years. If you scale that 150-million-kilometre gap down to a single metre, Earth itself shrinks to less than a tenth of a millimetre — invisible to the naked eye.
By weight
The Sun holds 99.86% of all the mass in our Solar System. Every planet, moon, asteroid and comet combined is dust by comparison.
The Sun fuses 600 million tonnes of hydrogen into helium every second. The light reaching you right now took 8 minutes to cross the gap — but it took roughly 100,000 years to fight its way out from the Sun's dense core. Every atom in your body heavier than helium was forged inside a star like this one.
Glossary
Did you know?
Our Sun is a perfectly average yellow-dwarf star. The largest red hypergiants like UY Scuti are over a thousand times wider, and the brightest blue supergiants pump out the light of a million Suns.
Last updated 2026-05-17
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Scale
A self-sustaining fusion engine at the heart of our system.
Size
1.39 million km
Tap a dot to preview it. Use the Open stop link to read its full page. Stops are arranged from smallest on the left to largest on the right.
The closest known star to the Sun — and still impossibly far.
The Solar System's largest planet — a failed star, almost.
The supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy — and its more extreme cousins.