Sunday, July 5, 2020

Size or Distance?

Our Solar System is so big, that it is impossible to create a scale model of it. 

Yes, you can scale the planets - if the Sun is a size of a room (5 m diameter), Jupiter will be about 50 cm, and Earth will be less than 5 cm in diameter. However, if you want to line them up on an ellipse that would represent their orbits, Earth would be 537 m (that's half a kilometre!) away from the Sun, and Neptune more than 16 km!

Watch this video to get an idea how complicated that is:


Go to this website and calculate the proportions of the planets, as well as their orbits.

If the Sun is a size of a typical soccer ball, how big is Mercury and Saturn? How far is Jupiter?


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