Our Sun is quite a small star, even though it measures 864,761 miles across, which is 109 times more than the Earth’s diameter. If the sun were the size of a football, the Earth would be less than one tenth of one inch across. Some start are known as supergiants. The star Antares, for example, is 700 times bigger than the sun. There is a start in the constellation of Auriga that may be 1,863 million miles in diameter, or 4,000 times bigger than our sun. The neutron star that remains after the explosion of a supernova may be only 12 miles in diameter, but of enormous mass. If it weighs more than two or three times that of our sun, it begins to collapse into a black hole.

Our Sun is part of the Milky Way, a huge disc-shaped collection of billions of start and interstellar derbis. Most of these start cannot be seen with the naked eye, but their combined light produces a huge milky-looking path across the night sky.

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