Around the Sun is the 13th studio album by the American alternative rock band R.E.M., released in 2004 on Warner Bros. Records.

"The Outsiders" features a guest appearance by rapper Q-Tip. When performed live, Michael Stipe carries out the rap, as he does on a later b-side release of the song.

"Final Straw" is a politically charged song. The version on the album is a remix of the original version, which was made available as a free download on March 25, 2003 from the band's website. The song was written as a protest of the American government's actions in the Iraq War.

Around the Sun is also the first R.E.M. album to contain a title track.

Around the Sun generally received lukewarm reviews, and despite hitting #1 in the UK, it became their first studio album to miss the U.S. Top 10 (reaching #13 with 7 weeks in the Billboard 200) since 1988's Green and is still awaiting a gold record. As of March 2007, Around the Sun has sold 2 million copies worldwide and 232,000 units in the U.S. This is less than R.E.M. had previously sold in the first week of an album's release while in their early to mid-1990s commercial peak.

The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is almost perfectly spherical and consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic fields. It has a diameter of about 1,392,000 km, about 109 times that of Earth, and its mass (about 2×10³⁰ kilograms, 330,000 times that of Earth) accounts for about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System. Chemically, about three quarters of the Sun's mass consists of hydrogen, while the rest is mostly helium. The remainder (1.69%, which nonetheless equals 5,628 times the mass of Earth) consists of heavier elements, including oxygen, carbon, neon and iron, among others.

The Sun's stellar classification, based on spectral class, is G2V, and is informally designated as a yellow dwarf, because its visible radiation is most intense in the yellow-green portion of the spectrum and although its color is white, from the surface of the Earth it may appear yellow because of atmospheric scattering of blue light. In the spectral class label, G2 indicates its surface temperature of approximately 5778 K (5505 °C), and V indicates that the Sun, like most stars, is a main-sequence star, and thus generates its energy by nuclear fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium. In its core, the Sun fuses 620 million metric tons of hydrogen each second. Once regarded by astronomers as a small and relatively insignificant star, the Sun is now thought to be brighter than about 85% of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy, most of which are red dwarfs. The absolute magnitude of the Sun is +4.83; however, as the star closest to Earth, the Sun is the brightest object in the sky with an apparent magnitude of −26.74. The Sun's hot corona continuously expands in space creating the solar wind, a stream of charged particles that extends to the heliopause at roughly 100 astronomical units. The bubble in the interstellar medium formed by the solar wind, the heliosphere, is the largest continuous structure in the Solar System.