Sun is the centre of our solar system and our parent star, it is a nearly perfect ball of hot plasma, so perfect that if we compress the sun into the size of a football, the difference between the maximum and minimum diameter of the sun would be less than the width of a human hair.

Facts about Sun

• The Sun is by far the largest object in the solar system. It contains more than 99.8% of the total mass of the Solar System with only Jupiter having the remaining 1.2%.
• The Sun’s radius is about 695,000 kilometres or 109 times that of Earth. Its mass is about 330,000 times that of Earth
•  Roughly three-quarters of the Sun’s mass consists of hydrogen (~73%); the rest is mostly helium (~25%), with much smaller quantities of heavier elements, including oxygen, carbon, neon, and iron.
• Conditions at the Sun’s core are extreme. The temperature is 15.6 million Kelvin and the pressure is 250 billion atmospheres. At the centre of the core, the Sun’s density is more than 150 times that of water.
• The Sun’s magnetic field is very strong and very complicated. Its magnetosphere (also known as the heliosphere) extends well beyond Pluto.
• The surface of the Sun called the photosphere, is at a temperature of about 5800 K. Sunspots are “cool” regions, only 3800 K (they look dark only by comparison with the surrounding regions). Sunspots can be very large, as much as 50,000 km in diameter. Sunspots are caused by complicated and not very well-understood interactions with the Sun’s magnetic field.
• Every second, the Sun’s core fuses about 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium, and in the process converts 4 million tons of matter into energy. This energy, which can take between 10,000 and 170,000 years to escape the core, is the source of the Sun’s light and heat.

Characteristics of the Sun

Mean distance from Earth	1.496×108 km
Mean distance from Milky Way core	2.7×1017 km
Galactic period	(2.25–2.50)×108 yr
Equatorial radius	696,342 km or 109 × Earth radii
Equatorial circumference	4.379×106 km or 109 × Earth
Surface Temperature	5,778 K
Age	≈ 4.6 billion years