Proximity is more important than size. It is more important than magnificence. You don’t have to be the biggest and shiniest in the universe to bring warmth and light to the people around you. You can be completely average, like our sun, and do the job quite well. You’ve just got to be close.
All night long we can see the stars shining down on us, but have you ever considered the fact that they also shine down on us all day? It’s not like they adjust the brightness of their burning to our sleep cycles. They shine on, always the same, always contributing something to our light. The big difference for us is just that one local star who comes around every morning and shines so brightly that the light of all the other billions of stars in the universe can’t compete at all.
Our sun is not a large star, as stars go. It’s bigger than some, but there are a lot of stars far bigger than it is—some of them more than 100 times bigger. But those super-massive balls of burning light only look like tiny pinpricks in the sky to us, and they are easily drowned out by our average little local fireball whenever he comes around. It’s not the size of the star that matters most, from our perspective: It’s the proximity. Those huge suns really are huge, but they are too far away to keep us warm. They are too distant to pull us in and shape our calendars and seasons, too far removed to fill the face of our moon with reflected light at night.
