The Enormity Of The Sun

We don’t see it every day especially in this part of the country, but it’s there. It brings us light, sometimes it brings us warmth. It’s the sun. We see it as a flaming ball of fire in the sky, but it’s the largest thing in our solar system. In fact of all the planets, the asteroids and everything else in the solar system the sun accounts for more than 99.8% of it. The sun is more than 864-thousand miles across – that more than three times the distance between the earth and the moon. The sun is so large that 1,300,000 planet earths could fit inside of it.

The average distance between the earth and the sun is about 91,500,000 miles. To give you an idea of how far that is if you could make a sound loud enough to cover that distance and considering the speed of sound, it would take 14 years for that sound to reach earth.

If you could build a railroad between the earth and the sun, a train traveling 24 hours a day at a speed of 30 miles an hour would take 341 years to complete the trip. Ten generations would be born and would die; the eleventh generation would finally see the end of the journey.

Source: www.findfast.org