Over recorded history, numerous pronouncements were made about the sun, and up through the 18th century, simple astronomical measurements on the sun were carried out with varying degrees of accuracy.

The sun is not just bigger than the Earth (or any other planet), it’s much bigger. It is almost 110 times farther across than the Earth, and contains almost 99.9% of the mass in the whole solar system.

May 18, 2020 · One AU is the distance from the Sun to Earth's orbit, which is about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers). When measured in astronomical units, the 886,000,000-mile (1,400,000,000-kilometer) distance from the Sun to Saturn's orbit, is a …

Pluto orbits the Sun about 3.6 billion miles (5.8 billion km) away on average, about 40 times as far as Earth, in a region called the Kuiper Belt.

The pebbly, granular surface of the sun, the photosphere, is where early astronomers focused most of their attention, because it is here that we find the easily observed blotches that are now called sunspots.

The Standard Model of the Sun (see Figure 1) makes it possible for scientists to estimate the temperature profile of the sun. Data from the sun's profile (see Figure 2) make it possible to make observations, predictions, and to compare these predictions based on the Standard Solar Model.

Europa orbits Jupiter, the fifth planet from the Sun. Jupiter orbits the Sun at a distance of roughly 500 million miles (780 million kilometers).

Europa orbits Jupiter at about 417,000 miles (671,000 kilometers) from the planet, which itself orbits the Sun at a distance of roughly 500 million miles (780 million kilometers), or 5.2 astronomical units (AU). One AU is the distance from Earth to the Sun. Light from the Sun takes about 45 minutes to reach Europa.

Surrounding the sun is its atmosphere, just like the air around the Earth. The lower layer of the sun's atmosphere is called the chromosphere, and the outer layer of its atmosphere is the corona.

NASA’s real-time science encyclopedia of deep space exploration. Our scientists and far-ranging robots explore the wild frontiers of our solar system.