star

Sun

Holds 99.86% of the mass of the entire solar system, and fuses roughly 600 million tonnes of hydrogen every second. The light reaching Earth left this surface about 8 minutes 20 seconds ago.

About Sun

The Sun is a G2V dwarf: unremarkable as stars go, and that ordinariness is the point. It is stable enough to have held Earth’s surface temperature inside the narrow band where liquid water persists for billions of years at a stretch. Energy released in the core takes on the order of a hundred thousand years to random-walk its way out to the photosphere, then eight minutes and twenty seconds to cross the gap to Earth.

Physical data

Diameter

1,391,400 km

Mass

333,000 earths

Surface gravity

274 m/s2

Rotation (equator)

25.4 d

Photosphere

5,505 C

Core

15.7 million C

Age

4.6 billion y

Positions from VSOP87, accurate to within one arcminute. Physical constants are published values and are not computed here.