Science & history · Our star
The Sun is a star, and an ordinary one
Every star you see at night is a sun. Ours looks different only because we are 150 million kilometres from it instead of light-years.
What kind of star
NASA classes the Sun as a G2 V star, a yellow dwarf on the main sequence: a star in the long, stable part of its life, fusing hydrogen in its core. "Dwarf" and "yellow" are parts of a classification, not a description of how it looks.
The next nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.24 light-years away. Light from the Sun reaches us in about eight minutes; light from Proxima takes more than four years.
A star on the move
The Sun carries the whole solar system around the centre of the Milky Way at about 720,000 kilometres per hour, and one lap takes about 230 million years. Nothing about that motion shows in the daily sky; the Sun's daily path is Earth turning.
Sources
- NASA Sun: Facts (opens in a new tab) for age, size, distance, temperatures, layers, rotation, cycle, type, future · checked 2 October 2026