If the Sun were an empty shell, about how many planets the size of Earth could you pour into it?
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Answer
About 1.3 million Earths
The Sun holds about 99.8 percent of all the mass in the solar system. Jupiter accounts for most of the rest.
How to estimate it
The Sun is 150 million km away and looks half a degree wide, so its diameter is about 150,000,000 / 115 = 1.3 million km. Earth is 12,800 km across, so the Sun is roughly 100 Earths wide. Volume grows with the cube of width: 100 × 100 × 100 = 1,000,000 Earths. Using the precise ratio of 109 gives the real figure, about 1,300,000.
Source: NASA
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