It’s almost impossible to imagine the vast distances
at play when picturing the size of our solar system,
and especially the distances to the
neighbouring stars.
Our brains are quite good at dealing with medium-sized
objects and distances like buildings, city blocks and
even entire cities, but when someone says that Pluto
is 7.3 BILLION kilometers away, what does that really
look like?
In order to get a sense of the immense scale of our
solar system and the distances between the planets,
let’s build a scale model in a city so we have some
common reference points for judging the relative
distances.
We’ll start in an American football field with the sun
placed at the 50 yard line and scaled to the size of a
44cm beach ball.
At this scale, Earth and Venus are the size of a small
stud earring, only 4mm in diameter. Jupiter is about
the size of a golf ball, Uranus and Neptune are the
size of a small marble, and our moon and Pluto are
closer to the size of a round candy sprinkle,
only 1mm in diameter.
Now let’s put them in their proper locations based on
their aphelions, or their farthest distances
from the sun.
We’ll find Mercury near the 26 yard line or 22 meters
from the sun. That’s equal to about 70 million
kilometers at actual scale.
Venus will be near the 12 yard line,
34 meters from the sun.
Earth can be found inside the end zone at 48 meters
from our beach ball sun.
And our little candy sprinkle-sized Moon is about 13cm
from the earring-sized Earth.
To find Mars, we’ll have to get up to the middle of
the lower seating section, about 80m from the sun.
At this scale, Mars is about 2mm in diameter, as you
can see compared to this bottle cap.
After Mars, the distances start to increase rapidly.
To get to Jupiter, we’ll have to head out 260m or 850ft,
which is halfway into the parking lot.
Saturn will take us all the way through the parking
lot and to the edge of the first block of the city,
or 480m from the sun.
Uranus is over 5 city blocks past the parking lot.
That’s 950 meters from the centre of the stadium.
Our small marble-sized Neptune takes us right to the
edge of our model city, almost 10 blocks from the
parking lot and 1.43km, or 0.89 miles from the sun.
Now we’ll make our way to little dwarf planet Pluto,
nearly 10 football fields past Neptune.
Fun fact: In this part of the animation, we’re
currently travelling at a scale speed of nearly 600
times the speed of light!
Pluto, here less than 1mm in diameter, is well beyond
the city and across the bridge at over 2.3 km, or 1.4
miles from the centre of the stadium.
That’s what 7.3 billion km looks like when our entire
planet is scaled down to a mere 4mm.
Now how far away do you think the nearest STAR would
be at this scale?
If our beach ball sun was in Yankee Stadium in New
York City, our entire solar system would be contained
within a 2 to 3 km radius between Harlem and
the Bronx.
At this scale, here is where Proxima Centauri, the
nearest star to our sun, would be found.
Not yet
Even farther!
The nearest star would be past Mumbai India at about
12,690 km away!
If we ever want to explore the neighbouring star
systems, I think we’re going to need some
faster ships!
Now that you’ve got a sense for the scale of our solar
system, why check out our video about the Hubble Deep
Field Images and the size of the Universe by clicking
here or in the description below.
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Thanks so much for watching. See you next time!
