The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System and is a nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma. Its diameter is about 1.39 million kilometers (864,000 miles) – 109 times that of Earth – and its mass is about 330,000 times that of Earth. The Sun accounts for about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System and its mass is comprised of hydrogen (~73%), helium (~25%), and other, much smaller quantities of heavier elements – including oxygen, carbon, neon, and iron. In terms of age, the Sun is roughly middle-aged and has not changed much for more than four billion years. Its core undergoes nuclear fusion whereby it fuses about 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second; the resulting energy (which can take between 10,000 and 170,000 years to escape from its core) is the source of the Sun’s light and heat.
Sources
“Sun.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 18 Feb. 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun.
Richard Ficek's ASTR 2110 Blog 
Great post!
It’s amazing how interesting and complex the Sun is right now – and it hasn’t even started to go through all the super interesting stages of its later life! For instance, how in its later life it will grow so big that it will consume the Earth, also making it thousands of times brighter. Given how powerful it is now, thinking about it getting that large is pretty insane.
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