Question

How much bigger is the sun’s diameter than the earth’s?

Answer 1

Hint: There are nine planets in our solar system. These nine planets complete revolution around the Sun with the Sun as the centre. The nine planets are:
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. The students should note that the order of planets is in the increasing order of distance from the sun and not in the increasing order of their sizes but none of these planets have the size greater than that of the sun.

Complete answer:
In our solar system, we have planets and only one star, Sun. Sun is a star as it is self-luminous and other planets do not luminate on its own. The planets reflect the light from the sun and thus, are non-luminous.
The largest planet in the solar system is Jupiter. The radius of Jupiter is approximately, equal to 70,000 kilometres. This means that the radii of all the planets combined, is lesser than that of the radius of Jupiter.
The shape of the sun is a near-perfect sphere, containing hot plasma. This hot plasma is fuelled by the nuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms to produce helium along with extremely large amounts of heat energy and light, which is the most important factor for life on Earth.
The diameter of the Sun is nearly equal to 1.4 million kilometres. Let the diameter of sun be represented by,
$\Rightarrow {D_s} = 1.4 \times {10^6}km$
The diameter of Earth is equal to –
$\Rightarrow {D_E} = 12800km$
The ratio of the diameter of sun to earth is equal to –
$\Rightarrow d = \dfrac{{{D_s}}}{{{D_E}}} = \dfrac{{1.4 \times {{10}^6}}}{{12800}} = 1.093 \times {10^{ - 4}} \times {10^6} = 110$
Therefore, the size of the sun is approximately 110 times of that of the size of the Earth.

Note: On similar lines, if we compare the masses of the sun and earth, we obtain the result that the mass of sun is about 0.3 million times that of the mass of the Earth. The mass of Sun, thus, accounts for 99.8% of that of the entire solar system.