How big is the Sun compared to other stars?
The Sun is not big. Space is.
Our Sun holds 99.86% of the solar system’s mass and could fit 1.3 million Earths inside — yet among stars it is middling. Most stars in the galaxy are smaller, cooler red dwarfs. But the giants dwarf everything: Betelgeuse, the red shoulder of Orion, is around 700 times the Sun’s radius — placed here, its surface would engulf Mars and reach toward the asteroid belt. The true record-holders are two to three times larger still.
Rough scale of the giants
These sizes carry real uncertainty — a hypergiant’s edge is a diffuse, pulsing thing, and estimates are revised often. That honesty is the point: the largest stars sit right at the limit of what we can measure. In the Cosmic Zoom, the Sun shrinks to nothing within the first breath of the journey to the stars.
Keep going
Every figure on this page is a real, rounded value checked against primary sources. Found something out of date? See how we keep it accurate.