Well, I don't know. Is the Dead Sea really a sea? Are the Blue Ridge really mountains? Is the East River a river? And I won't get us started on Pluto again.
The sun is the biggest object in the solar system; at about 865,000 miles (1.4 million kilometers) across, it's more than 100 times wider than Earth.
Using linear measurements to compare celestial bodies can be misleading. Sure, you can try to picture 100 Earths edge-to-edge across the sun's apparent disc, or find one of the many illustrations of such that exist. Or you can look up a volumetric comparison to find that its volume is like 1,300,000 times that of Earth's.
This doesn't mean that 1.3M Earths would fit inside the thing. Think of a crate of oranges, and how there's always space between the spheres.
Despite being enormous, our star is often called a "dwarf." So is the sun really a dwarf star?
We could call it a "tank" if we wanted to. So is the sun really a tank star?
My point here is that, at first glance, this isn't a science question; it's one of categorization or nomenclature. It's like asking "is homo sapiens really sapiens?"
Dwarf stars got their name when Danish astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung noticed that the reddest stars he observed were either much brighter or much fainter than the sun. He called the brighter ones "giants" and the dimmer ones "dwarfs..."
I do like knowing the history of science, and of words. Here, just as a wild guess, Hertzsprung was probably drawing on Norse mythology, which is absolutely crawling with giants and dwarfs.
Incidentally, there's some debate over the difference between "dwarfs" and "dwarves." Best I can tell, "dwarves" is generally used for the fantasy race popularized by Tolkien and blatantly stolen by D&D (Tolkien himself stole it from Norse mythology). From what I understand, humans of smaller stature prefer "dwarfs," and it's also the nomenclature for astronomical objects.
The sun is currently more similar in size and brightness to smaller, dimmer stars called red dwarfs than to giant stars, so the sun and its brethren also became classified as dwarf stars.
Like I said, it's a categorization thing. Also, "currently" is misleading. Yes, based on our best available information, the sun won't stay the same forever; it'll eventually blow up and turn red, or vice-versa. But "eventually" means billions of years from now.
Calling the sun yellow is a bit of a misnomer, however, as the sun's visible output is greatest in the green wavelengths, Guliano explained. But the sun emits all visible colors, so "the actual color of sunlight is white," Wong said.
One reason some non-scientists can't get into science is the nomenclature, though. For instance, the sun is also described, by astrophysicists at least, as a black body. As in black-body radiation. This confuses the fuck out of people, and they start muttering about "common sense," as if that were something that existed.
"The sun is yellow, but less-massive main sequence stars are orange or red, and more massive main sequence stars are blue," Carles Badenes, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh, told Live Science.
One of the science things that confused me as a kid was that, with stars, red is cooler and blue is hotter. Our bathroom faucet was labeled with blue for cold water and red for hot. Thus began my journey of understanding.
Color is probably less confusing than "dwarf" vs. "giant," though one can take those descriptions as being "smaller than average" or "larger than average" without getting too far off track. And yet, as we've seen, color descriptions can be misleading, as well.
Whatever box you put the sun in, and no matter how much I mutter about "the accursed daystar," it's still the sun, and while I avoid its direct rays like a vampire, it would suck if it weren't there.
