Approximately 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers from the Earth lies our nearest star, the Sun.

The Sun is responsible for life as we know it and for the entire solar system.

But the Sun doesn't just provide light and heat.

It also constantly affects the planets and solar systems

in ways that most people don't realize.

Learn more about the sun.

It's past, present, and future on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. A trick question that people like to ask, and maybe you've heard it, is what star is nearest

to the planet Earth? If they know a little bit about astronomy, they may say something like

Proximus Senturi.

But of course the answer is the sun.

The sun is literally and figuratively the center of the solar system.

Without the sun, there would be no solar system and there would be no Earth.

I'll start by giving you a perspective on just how big the Sun is.

The Sun is gargantuan compared to the earth.

Approximately 1 million Earths could fit inside the sun if it was a hollow sphere.

The diameter of the sun is 1.39 million kilometers or 864,000 miles, whereas the Earth only has a

diameter of 12,700 kilometers or 7,900 miles.

The solar system is often thought of as the sun, the planets, and all the other debris that's

floating around the sun.

In terms of mass, however, the solar system is really just the sun.

The sun compromises 99.86% of all of the mass in the solar system.

The sun is approximately 4.6 billion years old, only a few hundred million years older

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