I love simple questions that wind up having complicated—or at least not straightforward—answers. Astronomers twist themselves into knots, for example, trying to define what a planet is, even though it ...

It’s “common knowledge”—and the scare quotes should be a warning—that the sun is an average star. But it’s not, and in fact it’s not even close: The sun is in the top 90th percentile of stars by mass.