So The Sun Is How Many Times Bigger Than The Earth?

[JayBee74]

Useless trivia, I know, but I thought the answer was 109 times bigger, based on diameter, but you could actually fit 1.3 million Earths inside the Sun. The other size comparison was if the Sun was a basketball the Earth would be an apple-seed. You could fit 1.3 million apple seeds inside a basketball?

[23]

Re: So The Sun Is How Many Times Bigger Than The Earth?

Funny thing is of the few suns that they have discovered, ours is just as small compared to those.

[BurghFan]

Re: So The Sun Is How Many Times Bigger Than The Earth?

Funny thing is of the few suns that they have discovered, ours is just as small compared to those.

What? There are billions of stars in our galaxy alone and the majority of them are actually smaller than the sun. The reason being that as stellar mass increases, their lifepan decreases since larger stars burn off their fuel faster. The largest stars are 150-200 time the mass of the sun and only live a few million years while the smallest red dwarf stars may have masses as low as 1/10 that of the sun and may live for trillions of years. The sun is approximately 4.5 billion years old and has a miximum lifespan of about 10 billion years.

[Blzer]

Re: So The Sun Is How Many Times Bigger Than The Earth?

Useless trivia, I know, but I thought the answer was 109 times bigger, based on diameter, but you could actually fit 1.3 million Earths inside the Sun. The other size comparison was if the Sun was a basketball the Earth would be an apple-seed. You could fit 1.3 million apple seeds inside a basketball?

Well think about it this way (not the apple seed part, I'm unsure of that):

Say you have two LCD's, a 23" and a 46". The 46" LCD twenty-three inches longer, meaning the diagonal size of the screen technically makes it a larger TV by twice as much. But hold on there, champ... twice as large means that you are actually working with 75% more screen. That means that you can actually fit four 23" LCD's (by the screen size alone) in the area of a 46" LCD.

So in this model, any time that you multiply the size of your original screen by a factor of n, you can then fit n^2 objects of that original size within that new size. When you start to get to very large sizes (like 109 for instance), that 109^2 really adds up.

This idea changes even more dramatically with the case of the earth and the sun, because they are both spherical. That means that you can fit earths in three dimensions of this sun, not just two. You can probably fit much more than 109^2, or in this case, you might need to consider the formula for the volume of a sphere ((4/3)*pi*r^3). I'm sure you can fit many earths in the sun when taking that into consideration, but that's just a guess.

Cheerio.

[SPTO]

Re: So The Sun Is How Many Times Bigger Than The Earth?

Funny thing is of the few suns that they have discovered, ours is just as small compared to those.

Actually our sun is pretty much just a little below to average size. We sometimes think we're special but our solar system, sun, planets and area we occupy is pretty mundane and unremarkable when you look at the vastness of space.

[JayBee74]

Re: So The Sun Is How Many Times Bigger Than The Earth?

This idea changes even more dramatically with the case of the earth and the sun, because they are both spherical. That means that you can fit earths in three dimensions of this sun, not just two. You can probably fit much more than 109^2, or in this case, you might need to consider the formula for the volume of a sphere ((4/3)*pi*r^3). I'm sure you can fit many earths in the sun when taking that into consideration, but that's just a guess.
Cheerio.

It appears the formula is Diameter*Diameter*Diameter=Volume. I'm not sure why and I'm not sure if that how it works for a perfect sphere.

[DrJones]

Re: So The Sun Is How Many Times Bigger Than The Earth?

Lots.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEheh1BH34Q

[JayBee74]

Re: So The Sun Is How Many Times Bigger Than The Earth?

Actually our sun is pretty much just a little below to average size. We sometimes think we're special but our solar system, sun, planets and area we occupy is pretty mundane and unremarkable when you look at the vastness of space.

We're Kind of special-no evidence of anything like us in the known universe.

[Blzer]

Re: So The Sun Is How Many Times Bigger Than The Earth?

It appears the formula is Diameter*Diameter*Diameter=Volume. I'm not sure why and I'm not sure if that how it works for a perfect sphere.

Oh haha it must. I think the difference is because what they're saying is that if you stuck 1.3 million earths into a blender and mixed them so they would all be one unit, then they could fit into the sun. The other way would work if you have all of the earths touching each other in individual form, in which case you have a lot of empty space between the planets and a lot less earths as a result.

[JayBee74]

Re: So The Sun Is How Many Times Bigger Than The Earth?

Lots.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEheh1BH34Q

OK I'm officially awed! Great video.

[JayBee74]

Re: So The Sun Is How Many Times Bigger Than The Earth?

Oh haha it must. I think the difference is because what they're saying is that if you stuck 1.3 million earths into a blender and mixed them so they would all be one unit, then they could fit into the sun. The other way would work if you have all of the earths touching each other in individual form, in which case you have a lot of empty space between the planets and a lot less earths as a result.

I don't think you'd have to blend them-you'd just put them in whole, like dropping peas into a beach ball.

[SPTO]

Re: So The Sun Is How Many Times Bigger Than The Earth?

We're Kind of special-no evidence of anything like us in the known universe.

Key word being "known". We haven't even looked at 1% of the universe, for all we know we could be looking in the wrong area.

[Blzer]

Re: So The Sun Is How Many Times Bigger Than The Earth?

I don't think you'd have to blend them-you'd just put them in whole, like dropping peas into a beach ball.

Well the only reason I say maybe not is because the only thing we considered for both was their diameters. We are merely looking at one dimension, as in we can look at these as straight lines. A line doesn't occupy any sort of space, so when you're "filling in" that line as a comparison, you are filling up the entire line. So when we consider the sun as an actual sphere and when we must do so for the earth, we are merely looking at the volume that the earth is, not the actual shape of it. If we consider the earth as a sphere, then when dropping them into the sun sphere, for every four earths there will be 4/3 of an earth in between all four of them, but that space is empty in that model. Which is why you need to completely fill it in.

All I'm saying is that we can disregard the shape as long as we have the volume correct and that we understand we're occupying three-dimensional space. At least that's what I think, because in the case that we just discussed we cubed the size factor between the two to get our resulting number, which was actually correct.

I don't suppose this is very easy to understand over text, I'm just trying to give possible ideas.

EDIT: Re-reading my post, I forget how I got that 4/3 number.

[23]

Re: So The Sun Is How Many Times Bigger Than The Earth?

What? There are billions of stars in our galaxy alone and the majority of them are actually smaller than the sun. The reason being that as stellar mass increases, their lifepan decreases since larger stars burn off their fuel faster. The largest stars are 150-200 time the mass of the sun and only live a few million years while the smallest red dwarf stars may have masses as low as 1/10 that of the sun and may live for trillions of years. The sun is approximately 4.5 billion years old and has a miximum lifespan of about 10 billion years.

The largest known star is VY Canis Majoris; a red hypergiant star in the constellation Canis Major, located about 5,000 light-years from Earth. University of Minnesota professor Roberta Humphreys recently calculated its upper size at more than 2,100 times the size of the Sun. Placed in our Solar System, its surface would extend out past the orbit of Saturn. Light takes more than 8 hours to cross its circumference!

k

[TheMatrix31]

Re: So The Sun Is How Many Times Bigger Than The Earth?

That video is a total mind****.