Mount Everest, standing at 8,848.86 meters above sea level, is globally recognized as the highest point on Earth based on elevation above mean sea level. This towering peak in the Himalayas serves as a common benchmark for terrestrial height. However, the mountain’s immense scale naturally leads to the question of what objects, both on Earth and in the cosmos, exceed its size. By shifting the perspective on how size is measured—from peak elevation to total mass, radial distance, or sheer volume—we quickly discover that Everest is far from the largest feature in existence. The true scale of the universe reveals objects that dwarf the highest point on our home planet.
Larger Features on Earth
The claim of Everest being the world’s largest mountain depends entirely on the method of measurement. If the criterion is the total vertical distance from a mountain’s base to its summit, Mount Everest is surpassed by the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Kea. This massive shield volcano is mostly submerged beneath the Pacific Ocean, but it rises approximately 10,205 meters from its oceanic base to its peak. Only 4,205 meters of Mauna Kea are visible above the waves, making its total height nearly a mile taller than Everest.
Another geographical feature beats Everest in a different, highly specific measurement: the distance from the Earth’s center. Our planet is not a perfect sphere, but an oblate spheroid, meaning it bulges outward at the equator due to centrifugal force from its rotation. Due to this equatorial bulge, the summit of Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador is the point on Earth farthest from the planet’s core. Chimborazo’s peak is about 6,384.4 kilometers from the center, which is over 2,072 meters farther away than Everest’s summit.
Furthermore, Earth’s topography also features a depth that exceeds Everest’s height. The Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean contains the Challenger Deep, which plunges to a depth of approximately 10,994 meters below sea level. If Mount Everest were placed at the bottom of this trench, its peak would still be more than a mile underwater.
Planetary Scale Mountains and Bodies
Moving beyond Earth, the geological features of other planets introduce a dramatic increase in scale. The most famous example is Olympus Mons, a colossal shield volcano located on Mars and the tallest mountain currently discovered in our solar system. Olympus Mons rises over 21.9 kilometers above the surrounding Martian plains, making it roughly two and a half times the height of Mount Everest. Its base spans a diameter of approximately 600 kilometers, large enough to cover an area roughly the size of the entire state of Arizona.
This monumental size is possible because Mars lacks Earth’s dynamic plate tectonics and has weaker gravity. The absence of moving crustal plates allowed lava to accumulate in one spot for billions of years, building up a single, massive structure. The comparison shifts completely when considering entire planetary bodies rather than just surface features. Even the planet Mars itself, with a diameter of about 6,779 kilometers, is an object of vastly greater volume than any terrestrial mountain.
The scale difference continues to expand with the gas giants, such as Jupiter, which has a diameter more than 11 times that of Earth. Whole planets, moons, and asteroids are entities whose three-dimensional size and mass are in a different category from a mountain. The entire mass of Mount Everest is a nearly negligible fraction of the mass of even a small planet.
The True Giants of Space
The scale becomes vast when comparing Mount Everest to objects outside our solar system, where distance is measured in light-years. Our own star, the Sun, has a diameter of about 1.39 million kilometers. The Sun’s volume is so vast that it could contain over a million Earths.
Even the Sun is considered an average-sized star, and it is dwarfed by the hypergiant stars. For instance, the red hypergiant UY Scuti is one of the largest stars known, with a radius estimated to be over 1,700 times that of the Sun. Another candidate, Stephenson 2-18, is estimated to be even larger, potentially over 2,150 times the radius of the Sun. If Stephenson 2-18 were placed at the center of our solar system, its outer edge would extend past the orbit of Saturn.
The comparison then transitions from single stars to massive collections of stars and gas. Nebulae, vast clouds of gas and dust where stars are born, can stretch for hundreds of light-years, representing immense volumes of matter and space. Finally, the comparison reaches the galactic scale, where Everest is an infinitesimal speck.
Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is a barred spiral galaxy estimated to be about 100,000 light-years across. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, which is nearly 9.5 trillion kilometers. The sheer volume of space contained within the Milky Way, which holds hundreds of billions of stars, is the ultimate answer to what is bigger than Mount Everest.