Space

I made some space-themed diagrams of the size of stars and planets. The pictures can be enlarged by clicking.

Brightest stars of constellations

The pictures show the relative size (by radius) of the brightest star of each constellation and the Sun. The only one missing is Antares of Scorpius which is too big. Monoceros and Delphinus have the second brightest star because I couldn't find the size of the brightest one. The data for systems of multiple stars are for the biggest star. The name of a star also usually refers to the biggest star of a system, because IAU doesn't give common names for systems anymore.

There are so many stars and they vary in size so much that I made three images that zoom gradually in and leave the bigger stars out.

The stars are roughly coloured by spectral class. The green circles are objects that are for scale.

Green, blue and reddish yellow concentric circles in various sizes. The circles are named after stars. The innermost one is a very small Sun which is surrounded by blue stars. Further out are both yellowish and blue stars. Inside the orbit of Mercury there are many stars, between it and the orbit of Venus there are a few stars and between the orbits of Venus and Earth there are two stars of which the bigger one is Deneb.
The innermost circles from the previous image. Especially in the middle there is a lot of blue but the ones in the very centre are yellowish. The Sun is now a clearly visible circle and the outermost one is δ Crateris.
Again only the innermost circles. Most of the stars are blue. In the middle there is a fairly small circle that is Jupiter for scale. Around it there is first some empty and then Hoerikwaggo and the Sun in addition to some other yellowish stars. Sirius is the first blue star, and the outermost one is α Muscae.

Largest and smallest stars

The largest and smallest stars of the Milky Way. The images only show some stars that I thought would be good in the image, and not all stars that should be on the list. Of course the largest and smallest star are in there.

Yellowish, reddish and green circles with about equal distances. In the middle the Sun is only one pixel and around it are the fairly small white Polaris and blue Rigel. Next are the orbits of Earth and Mars after which there is the reddish yellow Mira. After that the stars are getting bigger and are named V382 Carinae, CW Leonis, Antares, Betelgeuse, S Cassiopeiae and VV Cephei A. Next is the size of the orbit of Jupiter, after which there are still WY Velorum A, S Persei, VY Canis Majoris and the biggest, RSGC1-F01.
Reddish yellow circles and four green circles for scale. In the middle there is the Arizona Meteor Crater as a fairly small circle and the fairly big Söderfjärden crater. The smallest star is SGR J1935+2154 after which there is a second star before the distance from Greenwich Observatory to Hyde Park. After that there are five bigger stars and the outermost one is the distance from Greenwich Observatory to Heathrow Airport.

Solar system

Sun and planets. At the top the sizes are in scale and the distances are not, at the bottom the distances are in scale and the sizes are not.

Two rows of circles with various colours. The top row has a very big Sun, a two-pixel wide Mercury and somewhat bigger Venus, Earth and Mars. Jupiter and Saturn are fairly big and Uranus and Neptune a little smaller. The bottom row has small circles of the same size and the four first planets are pretty close to the Sun. The further out you go, the longer the distances are, and Neptune is quite far away.

Exoplanets

Of the exoplanets found so far, the 5191 whose radius is known. Pink Jupiter and yellow Sun are also there for scale in their own places.

A narrow and long image with a black background and thousands of circles with grey filling in order by size starting from one pixel and ending up with quite a big one. The pink Jupiter is about one fourth of the image height from the beginning, and after the yellow Sun there are still seven bigger planets.

Published

License

Rauli Häyrynen, 2025.

The images on this page are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. In short: you are free to share and make derivative works of the file under the conditions that you appropriately attribute it, and that you distribute it only under a license identical to this one.

Sources

Wikipedia articles List of largest stars, List of smallest known stars and IAU designated constellations as well as articles for the Sun and planets.

Catalogue of Exoplanets