Carol Higgins, age 10 ., of Colville, Wash., for her question:

How big is the sun?

The shape of the sun is round.. like a ball, A line around its waist is slightly longer than a line looped around its poles. Its blazing center is 433,000 miles below its blazing surface. A line through the middle from side to side, the diameters is 866,000 miles, That is a large volume for our minds to grasp,

So, lets compare it with something we know. The earth is the biggest thing we know by experience. So let's compare the volume of the sun with the volume of the earth. The diameter of the earth at the equator is 7926.677 miles. That is about as far as the distance from Jerusalem to E1 Paso, The diameter of the sun is this distance, multiplied by 109.3,

All together, the sun is 1,300,000 times larger in volume than the whole earth. This moans that 1,300,000 earths could fit into the volume of space taken up by the sun.