And Beyond...All of the planets in our solar system circle about the sun. The sun is by far the largest object in our solar system. The sun has a diameter over 109 times greater than the Earth's. It has a mass 333,434 times that of the Earth. It has a volume 1.3 million times greater than the Earth. The sun is a star. It shines brighter than the other stars in our sky because it is much closer to us than any of the other stars. As stars go, the sun is not a particularly large star. In fact, it is classified as a dwarf star. There are over one hundred billion stars just in our own galaxy. Many of them are much bigger than our sun. Some are much smaller. Recently, astronomers have used advanced telescopes and instruments to discover planets circling other stars. Because they are so far away, we can tell very little about these newly discovered worlds. But we can tell that some of them are even more massive than Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. We
are just beginning to learn about these new solar systems. More are being discovered
all of the time. But because of their great distance from us, we can't see any
details of these planets. Perhaps in the future, you will use new telescopes and
equipment to measure the size of these worlds and other worlds that we don't even
know about today.
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Intro | Diameter
| Volume | Mass
| NASA Ames Educator Resource Center Content
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