How Big Is the Sun?
It is very difficult to gain a clear idea of how very large the sun really is. We know from the scientists who have measured it with their accurate measuring instruments that it is 865,000 miles through it, and that at its largest part it is 2,722,000 miles around. Now, you can see why I said it is very difficult to get a clear conception of the sun’s size. A mile is quite a long distance to walk on a hot day. Now, the earth is 8000 miles through. If there were a tunnel right through the earth, like the subway, and you started to walk it, it would take you 83¹⁄₃ days if you walked day and night without stopping to rest or eat, if you kept going at the rate of four miles every hour. This would be a long, hot walk, for, of course, the inside of the earth is hot, as we have already learned. It would take an automobile, going at the rate of 40 miles an hour night and day, about nine days to make the trip through such a subway from one side of the earth to the other. That makes it look like a pretty big old earth, doesn’t it? But let us see what would happen if we started to do the same thing on the sun. The sun is 865,000 miles through. If you were to walk through a similar tunnel on the sun at four miles per hour it would take you 20 years, not counting the stops, and an automobile going 40 miles an hour day and night would take two years and a half to make the trip one way.
The sun is ninety million miles from the earth and an automobile travelling at the rate of forty miles per hour day and night on a straight road, without stopping, would be 257 years in getting there.
When we stop to think of how big the bulk of the sun is it is altogether beyond us. We have a general idea that our earth is a pretty large affair as worlds go, and yet we cannot conceive how much the bulk of the earth amounts to. Still, the sun is so large that it could contain a million worlds like our own.