1. The Sun holds 99.8% of all mass in our solar system. The Sun is so gigantic that it contains almost all the matter in the entire solar system! Its immense gravitational pull is what keeps Earth, seven other planets, dwarf planets, and millions of asteroids orbiting smoothly around it.

2. One million Earths could fit inside the Sun. If the Sun were a hollow glass jar, you could squeeze about 1,300,000 Earth-sized planets inside it! It measures about 865,000 miles across, which is over 100 times wider than our planet.

3. Sunlight takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach your eyes. Light travels at an incredible speed of 186,282 miles per second. Because the Sun is about 93 million miles away, the sunlight you see outside right now actually left the surface of the Sun more than eight minutes ago!

4. The core is a mind-blowing 27 million degrees Fahrenheit. The center of the Sun is so scorching hot that hydrogen gas atoms get smashed together under extreme pressure to create helium! This process, called nuclear fusion, generates all the light and heat energy that powers life on Earth.

5. The Sun is actually white, not yellow. We see the Sun as yellow or orange because Earth's atmosphere scatters short blue wavelengths of light away in every direction (which makes the sky look blue!). In outer space, the Sun shines in a crisp, brilliant white that includes all colors of the rainbow.

6. Solar winds create colorful northern lights. The Sun constantly blows a stream of charged magnetic particles into space called the solar wind. When these particles slam into Earth's magnetic field near the North and South Poles, they light up gases in our upper atmosphere to create glowing green and purple auroras!

7. The Sun is about halfway through its life. Scientists estimate that our Sun formed about 4.6 billion years ago from a giant spinning cloud of gas and space dust. It has enough hydrogen fuel left in its core to keep burning steadily for another 5 billion years!