The sunis at the centre of a group of eight planets. The planets travel around the sun. The paths they follow around the sun are called orbits. The sun, the planets, their moons and everything else orbiting the sun are called the solar system.
The sun looks like a small ball in the sky, but it is a giant compared to the earth. It is as wide as 109 earths placed side by side. If you had a bag the size of the sun, you would need more than a million earths to fill it. And if you could put the sun on one end of a seesaw, you would need 333,000 earths on the other end to balance it.
Without the sun, the earth would be a dry, cold, brown, lifeless rock. The sun provides us with light and heat which most living thinks need to survive. It warms the land and sea, so that moisture evaporates from the oceans, lakes and rivers to form rain clouds.
The earth’s gravity holds us down on the ground. The sun has gravity, too, which holds the planets in their orbits. Without the suns gravity, the planets would go flying off into deep space and the solar system would not exist.
sun facts
size across the middle > 1,392,000 kilometres
mass >as much as 333,000 earths
distance from earth > about 150 million kilometres
warning
never look straight at the sun and
never look at it through a camera , binoculars
or a telescope. the light from the sun is so strong
it can make you go blind, even if you are wearing dark glasses.