I think most of us have a reasonable idea that the Earth is fairly tiny compared to the Sun, not to mention a few other planets in our solar system. I certainly thought I had a pretty good idea of the scale, until I started drawing it out. Wow. Looking at the stats didn’t give me a proper feel for just HOW MUCH bigger the Sun is than the Earth!





To get the full effect and see the planets and major moons compared to the full size of the Sun, click on the image to the right (which is just an extract, with the sun trimmed to fit into this post).

Surprising don’t you think? But when you look at the numbers, maybe we shouldn’t really be so surprised. Here’s a very brief run through…

The Sun

The Sun is around 1,391,684km in diameter, and weighs in at a hefty 1,988,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000kg.

Our star isn’t just the biggest thing in our solar system, it actually contains an amazing 99.86% of all the mass in the Solar system. That means that all the planets, moons, planetoids, asteroids, comets and dust make up only 0.14%!

Jupiter and Saturn

So, the Sun hogging 99.86% of mass in our area doesn’t seem to leave much for the rest of us! But there’s even less once you take the two next biggest objects in the solar system, Jupiter and Saturn – which together represent more than 88% of what’s left…

The Earth

That leaves us on planet Earth with just about 0.2% of the mass outside the Sun to play with, or a tiny 0.0003% of the total mass of the Solar System. Oh well. We seem to be doing ok with what we have.

Petite Pluto

I included Pluto in this graphic because it is a familiar object, which was one of the reasons many people were upset when it was demoted from ‘planet’ status in 2006. But as you can see here, the re-classified ‘dwarf planet’ is smaller than most of the major moons of the Solar System. More importantly there are other lesser known, but similar sized, objects to Pluto orbiting the Sun that aren’t shown in this picture – including Eris, and Ceres.

Read more:

NASA Solar System Factsheets

Astrophysical Journal paper on measuring the size of the Sun