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The Sun is the largest thing in our solar system by a wide margin. With a diameter of about 865,000 miles (1.4 million km), more than 1.3 million Earths could fit inside. In fact, our planet is about the same size as the average sunspot.
If you’re still not impressed, know that the Sun contains a staggering 99.86% of the mass of the entire solar system.But it isn't quite the largest star in the universe.
And that's putting things mildly — very mildly.
The Sun is a G-type main-sequence star. Informally, it’s known as a yellow dwarf. However, this last title is a little misleading, as the Sun (like all G-type stars) is actually white. It only looks yellow because of Earth’s atmosphere.
Nevertheless, the word “dwarf” should give you an idea of how large our star is when compared to other stars.
Spoiler alert: It’s not very large.
The Pistol star is an extremely bright blue hypergiant. It’s one of the Milky Way's most luminous and massive stars, shining with the light of 10 million Suns. And it’s enormous.
The Pistol star is about ~250 million miles across. For comparison, Earth's orbital diameter is roughly 180 million miles, which means that all of Earth's orbit would fit inside the Pistol star.
Betelgeuse is even larger. It’s a red supergiant star that is puffing up and expanding as it nears the end of its life. It’s about 700 times the size of the Sun and around 15 times more massive. If Betelgeuse was placed in the center of our solar system, it would stretch past Jupiter's orbit.
And, of course, stars get much larger than even this. Take VY Canis Majoris, one of the biggest and brightest stars in the known universe. The red hypergiant has a diameter of about 1.2 billion miles (2 billion km). It’s so huge you could fit 3 billion Suns inside it.
We didn’t include it in the image because, well, it wouldn’t remotely fit. However, you can see what it would look like next to the Sun in the images below.
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