The sun is a big nuclear fusion reactor, with no containment building around it! Good thing it's a nice safe distance away at 150 million kilometers (93 million miles).

But without the sun, there'd be no solar system.

All the planets, moons, asteroids, and comets orbit around it, held there by the sun's immense gravity. With a mass 330,000 times that of Earth, the sun contains almost 1,000 times as much matter as all the other objects in the solar system put together!

The sun is about 110 times wider than Earth. And about a million Earths could fit inside it!

As stars go, the sun is slightly larger and hotter than the average star, which would have a mass about one half that of the sun.