Clay Corpening, age 8, of High Point, North Carolina, for his question:

What is the sun's diameter?

Its diameter measures how wide it is    and up there in the sky the sun does mot look very wide. This is because it is so far away and the distance makes it look smaller than it really is. Actually, the sun's diameter is 865,000 miles. This is about 109 times wider than the earth's diameter. But it does not mean that the sun is only 109 times bigger than the earth.

The true size of the sun is called its volume. And this is 1,300,000 times bigger than the volume of the earth. Suppose the sun were a hollow ball. It would be able to swallow one million earth sized planets    and have room to swallow 300;000 more. It just looks so small because it is about 93 million miles away from us.