Galileo's telescope made sense of the facts. Take the sun, figure out how far to move it to make it look as faint as a bright star, and its size in the sky will dwindle to a luminous bright point. It is the optics of the eye that surround a bright point with the dazzling artifact of those glaring rays. Let me speak of my friend Carl Sagan, outstanding public figure among all astronomers, who died in December 1996 at the untimely age of 62. The whole Earth is seen as a planet among planets, just as a sun from afar is only a star among stars.
Distance alone makes planet and sun dwindle.
When I was a graduate student, it was fashionable to believe that our solar system might be unique in the Galaxy. I believed that then, too, because the picture of planet formation was one of near-colliding stars. The theory was that one star orbited fast and close past the sun to escape to space, but it pulled out a lot of gas from its collision partner. That gas over a long time condensed into the planets, comets, etc. But you could calculate that such a star collision was very rare, maybe very few over all the age of all the stars.