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Journal Articles American Journal of Physics Year : 2022

The size of the Sun

Marc-Antoine Fardin
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Abstract

Why does the Sun have a radius around 696 000 km? We will see in this article that dimensional arguments can be used to understand the size of the Sun and of a few other things along the way. These arguments are not new and can be found scattered in textbooks. They are presented here in a succinct way in order to better confront the kinematic and mechanical viewpoints on size. We derive and compare a number of expressions for the size of the Sun and relate large and small scales. We hope that such presentation will be useful to students, instructors, and researchers alike.
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Dates and versions

hal-03901202 , version 1 (15-12-2022)

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Marc-Antoine Fardin, M. Hautefeuille. The size of the Sun. American Journal of Physics, 2022, 90 (12), pp.914-920. ⟨10.1119/5.0081964⟩. ⟨hal-03901202⟩
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