The Sun is one of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Yet to us here on Earth, it is everything. Without the Sun, we’d have no food, no flowers, no calendars, no weather—and no nasty sunburns. Our world would be just another frozen rock floating in space.
In earliest times, people thought that the Sun was a powerful god or goddess. But in 430 B.C., the Greek scientist Anaxagoras (an-aks-AG-oo-ras) put forward the idea that the Sun was in fact a flaming rock about 100 miles wide.
Since then, we’ve learned a great deal more about the Sun. For example, we now know that it’s actually a ball of hot gas. It’s also so huge that more than a million Earths could fit inside it.
Of the billions of stars in our galaxy, the Sun is the closest to Earth. It provides the heat and light that power our planet, making all life here possible.
