Sun Facts for Kids

Imagine trying to cram every single person and toy you know into one massive classroom-then multiply that by over a million! That's how much bigger the Sun is than our home planet.

The Sun’s volume is about 1,300,000 times the volume of Earth. If you lined up 109 Earths across the Sun's middle, they would just fit!

It holds 99.86% of all the stuff in our entire Solar System. Seriously, we are just tiny passengers floating around its massive gravity!

The Sun is not just hot-it’s outrageously, unbelievably hot! The temperature on the surface (the part we see) is a 'cool' 10,000 °F.

But you need to go deep inside to the core where the magic happens. Down there, it hits a mind-blowing 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million degrees Celsius)!

That heat is so intense it turns the gas into a super-charged state called plasma-it’s way hotter than any fire you can imagine.

Think about how fast light is-it's the fastest thing in the universe! Even at that speed, it still takes a journey to get here.

Light leaves the Sun and zooms across the 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) to your eyes in about 8 minutes and 20 seconds.

This means you are always seeing the Sun as it was over 8 minutes ago-if it suddenly switched off, we wouldn't know for over 8 minutes!

This is called nuclear fusion, and it’s how the Sun powers everything! It smashes hydrogen atoms together in the core to make helium.

The Sun is a fantastic fuel-converter, turning about 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second.

Even crazier, it converts about 4 million tons of that matter directly into pure energy-that's the light and heat we feel!

Sometimes the Sun gets a bit stormy and spits out huge bursts of energy called solar flares!

These flares can send plasma shooting away from the Sun at speeds reaching up to 2,000 kilometers per second.

That speed is so high it would take that energy less than 15 minutes to travel the entire 93 million miles to Earth!

This is one of space’s biggest puzzles! The 'surface' (photosphere) is about 10,000 °F, but the layer above it, the corona, can hit 1.8 million °F!

It’s like throwing a snowball at a bonfire and watching it get hotter the farther away it gets from the fire!

Scientists are still working hard to figure out exactly why this outer layer is so unbelievably scorching.

Sunspots look like little freckles, but they are actually super cool (not really cool, just cooler than the rest of the Sun!) and dark magnetic storms.

The largest sunspots can be almost 12,000 times the area of Earth, meaning you could easily fit our entire world inside one!

They happen because the magnetic field lines get twisted up, like pulling a rubber band too tight.

The Sun isn't always the same! Its magnetic field flips over every 11 years, causing its behavior to change dramatically.

At solar minimum, there are hardly any sunspots, and it's quiet. But at solar maximum, it gets grumpy, blasting out lots of flares and CMEs!

This predictable change is how scientists track space weather, helping us know when to watch for solar storms.

The Sun’s breath, called the solar wind, is a stream of particles that flies out in all directions.

This wind creates a giant magnetic bubble around everything called the heliosphere, which stretches way past Pluto!

That means Earth is actually floating inside the Sun's gigantic atmosphere, which is wild for kids to think about!

The Sun is currently about 4.6 billion years old and is roughly halfway through its stable life.

In about 5 billion years, it will run out of its main fuel and puff up into a red giant star.

When that happens, it will get so big it will likely swallow Mercury and Venus, and maybe even our Earth!