Exactly how big is the planet Earth?
(Picture of Earth provided by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)
From our own perspective, Earth seems to be an extremely massive place.
So how big is it? If you consider how big our planet is on a solar level, then it really isn't very big at all. In fact, Earth would be no more than a speck of dust when compared to some of the massive bodies out there in the universe!
When you compare the size of Earth to just the Sun alone, you get an idea of how small we really are. In terms of volume, the Sun is about 1,300,000 times larger than the planet Earth. That means it would take more than 100 Earths side-by-side to be the same length as the Sun's diameter!
The exact volume of Earth is 1,083,210,000,000 cubic kilometers. You can think of the Earth as being 1.08 trillion cubic kilometers of rock and metal. That is a lot of iron (among other things).
The exact diameter of Earth is 12,756 kilometers. That means, if you could dig a tunnel right through the Earth's center to the other side, it would be 12,756 kilometers long. That's a long trip!
Here are some fun ways to envision how big the planet Earth is:
Earth's mass - 5,970,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg
Largest blue whale's mass - 200,000 kg
Adult African elephant's mass - 5000 kg
Average sized apple's mass - 0.15 kg
An ant's mass - 0.0003 kg
It would take the length of 180,680 Boeing 747 airplanes to match the length of the Earth's diameter.