Ask Ethan: What if the Sun were a grain of sand?

From the perspective of a human being, it’s almost impossible to fathom just how mind-bogglingly large the cosmic scales are. An average human is a little less than 2 meters in height, but planet Earth is more than 12,000 kilometers in diameter. The Sun is larger, at 1.4 million kilometers across, and incredibly far away: some 150 million kilometers distant. And these numbers, grand though they may seem, are paltry compared to what lies beyond our inner Solar System. Neptune is more than 4 billion kilometers away; the next-nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light-years (or ~40 trillion km) distant, while the Milky Way itself is more than 100,000 light-years across. <a href="https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/ask-ethan-what-if-the-sun-were-a-grain-of-sand-d0b041c9c734">Learn More</a>