It depends on the star… but if we take our closest star as an example (the Sun) it is roughly 1.4 million kilometers in diameter. That’s over 100x bigger than the Earth, which is just under 13,000 km across. It’s hard for our brains to understand those sorts of distances as we can’t relate it back to anything that we experience in our day to day lives.
As a quick, silly thought experiment, if someone built a motorway right through the centre of the Earth and you hopped in your car and drove non-stop (keeping to the speed limit – 70 mph is roughly 110 kph), it would take you just under 5 days to get to the other side. If the same was possible through the Sun, it would take 527 days to complete the distance – almost a 1.5 years. You would need to pack a lot of snacks.
And don’t forget, our Sun is actually a pretty small star by universe standards…. there are some stars out there that are over 2 billion km in diameter!
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Marianne M commented on :
It depends on the star… but if we take our closest star as an example (the Sun) it is roughly 1.4 million kilometers in diameter. That’s over 100x bigger than the Earth, which is just under 13,000 km across. It’s hard for our brains to understand those sorts of distances as we can’t relate it back to anything that we experience in our day to day lives.
As a quick, silly thought experiment, if someone built a motorway right through the centre of the Earth and you hopped in your car and drove non-stop (keeping to the speed limit – 70 mph is roughly 110 kph), it would take you just under 5 days to get to the other side. If the same was possible through the Sun, it would take 527 days to complete the distance – almost a 1.5 years. You would need to pack a lot of snacks.
And don’t forget, our Sun is actually a pretty small star by universe standards…. there are some stars out there that are over 2 billion km in diameter!