It's difficult to tell whether or not something is large or small without some basis for comparison. We may often stand at the edge of the ocean and stare out at its vast emptiness and feel tiny. But there are even greater scales of comparison out there.
The picture above imagines what the Earth might look like if it were compared to the sun. As you can see, the gigantic globe that we call home is a mere speck when placed up against the star that provides our warmth and energy. Here are some fun facts from the astronomy website that provided this image:
Across the Sun’s disk you could fit 109 Earths side by side, and to fill the Sun’s volume would take 1,300,000 Earths. On closer inspection the Sun has a granular or cellular appearance, these granules on the photosphere are the tops of convective cells that are plasma rising up from below. The solar disk has up to 4 million of these granules across its disk at any one time, and are on average the size of Texas.
The Sun puts out more energy in 1 second than has ever been produced in all of human history, and loses 4 billion tonnes of material into space every second but has enough to last for another 5 billion years. A solar flare, an explosion from the Sun’s surface caused when hugely powerful magnetic fields break apart under stress, can have the power of a billion Hiroshima bombs.
Here is the link to the full article for the Sun versus Earth comparison: http://astronomycentral.co.uk/astronomy-the-size-of-stuff/
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