If our sun was reduced to size of basketball... say 12"....how close in miles would the nearest star be?

Answer 1

What an amazing series of answers. I use this image of a scale model in religion classes frequently, so my calculations have been checked many times.

Reducing the sun's 870,000 mile diameter to a diameter of one foot requires a ratio of scale = 4.593E09 to one; that is 4,593,600,000 basketballs per sun.

Next, the nearest star is roughly 4.6 light years away, or 26,680,000,000,000 miles. Divide that by the scale, and you get 5808 miles, or about the distance from London to Kathmandu.

On that scale, the earth would be about the size of a BB. shot, and the moon would be about the size of the dot made by a number 2 lead pencil. If you set the BB shot in the middle of an 8-1/2 by 11 inch sheet of typing paper and draw an oval that just fits inside the paper, that would be a pretty good representation of the earth and the moon's orbit.

The basketball representing the sun, then, would be at a distance roughly the length of two long tractor trailer trucks, parked end to end.

Answer 2

OK, first, no one should be criticized for being curious.

second,

the diameter of the sun is about 864 948 miles. reducing it to twelve inches means it becomes 4 566 929 134 times smaller so the distance to the nearest star (proxima centauri) must also shrink by the same amount. proxima centauri is about 24 807 000 000 000 miles away so if the sun were twelve inches across then proxima centauri would be about 5 432 miles away.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri

Answer 3

Nearest star is about 4.28 light-years away, or about 2.53x10^13 miles. Suns' diameter is about 865000 miles, or about 4.57x10^9 ft. So if the sun's diameter is scaled down to 1 ft, the conversion factor is simply 4.57x10^9. The nearest star is then at a distance of about 5530 miles.

Answer 4

The sun is about 870000 miles in diameter. Reducing this to 1 foot scales by a factor of 870000*5280 which is about 460000000 (4.6E9). A light year is about 5.85E12, dividing gives 1.27E3 = 1270, which is about 1/4 miles per light year (unless I messed up the division)

Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, is about 4.2 light years away, so very approximately this would map to a little over 1 mile.

Answer 5

The distance would be about 29540.5 kilometers (18355.6 miles). This is a little over two thirds the circumference of the Earth, and about four times the distance from New York to Hawaii.

Answer 6

using approximations here: The diameter of the sun is 870,000 miles. The distance from the sun to Proxima Centauri is 25.3 TRILLION miles (the distance light travels in 1 year - 5.88 Trillion -multiplied by 4.3ly - Proxima's calculated distance. SO, you divide 12" by 870,000 and multiple the product by 25.3 trillion, convert inches to feet, then feet to miles (5280) and you get = 5,504 feet.
A bit over a mile

Answer 7

Let's be serious and do the sum.

It is much easier with metric, so we will call twelve inches one-third of a metre.

The sun is about 150,000,000 kms wide, so in your model, 1 metre = 450,000,000 kms (4.5 x 10^8).

The nearest star is 4.3 light years, and a light year in kilometres is a nice figure 10 to power 13 (10 trillion)

So nearest star is 4.3 x 10^13 kilometers.

Divide that by 4.5 x 10^8 and you get metres distance on this scale model.

4.5 is as near to 4.3 as damn it, so we can cancel those out.

so it is 10^13 divided by 10^8

= 10^5 metres

= 100,000 metres

which is 100 kilometres

(Oh, I love metric, but we had better get it to miles for our American cousins)

which is about 60 miles.

So, if the sun were a basketball, the nearest star would be about 60 miles away.

Answer 8

Our sun is a star, so the distance would be reduced by the amount of the sun's circumference that is subtracted to reduce it to 1 foot.

Answer 9

Exactly the same distance to the sun as it is now. The diameter of the sun has decreased, but it's location in the galaxy (the location of it's core) has stayed in the same spot.

Answer 10

youve been thinking way too much. if the sun was reduced to the size of a basketball it wouldnt matter how close the nearest star was because the sun wouldnt be large enough to heat our planet and we would all die.