Understanding the sense of scale and size of our solar system?

Question

OK, so if I imagine the Earth to be the size of an apple, how big and how far away would the sun and the other planets be relative to our apple sized Earth?
Do you have a better example, rather than using the Earth as an apple?

Answer 1

http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/solar_system/index.html this should help

Answer 2

Ok, if you imagine the earth to be the size of a bb gun pellet, i.e 5 millimeters across/a fifth of an inch, then the sun would be about 56 meters away or 185 feet or 12-15 car lengths away.

As for the size of it, well sun is almost exactly 100 times the diameter of the earth so that would make it around 50cm in diameter. Just imagine 100 bb gun pellets in a row and that's how far it would be accross. Or imagine it as the size of one of those big round baloon type things that kids bouce on. Space Hoppers i think they're called. Or maybe around half the size of a fridge freezer, so just the size of the bottom freezer bit basically. That is an average distance though and the earth is closer to the sun in december than at any other time of year and furthest away in June. But i don't think the difference would be more than a few feet/less than million miles in real terms.

AS for the distance of the planets, well all the inner planets would be within 50 feet or so of each other in terms of their distance from the sun. That doesn't mean they are actually that close right now becuase they will all be in different positions on their orbit and some could be on the opposite side of the sun to us right now.

As you get past mars and toward the planets, the distnaces are much further. Mars might be just 250 feet from the sun, but jupiter would be almost a quarter of a mile away, and then saturn would be half a mile away and along with jupiter it would be about the size of a snooker ball or pool ball, uranus and neptune are both a bit smaller but still far bigger than the earth and they would be about 1 mile away and 1.5 miles away respectively. Finally, pluto would be about 2 miles away.

Once you get to the very edge of the solar system, and this is where my source comes in, it is defined by a kind of bubble of gas which surrounds and protects the entire solar system. This would be much further away than pluto and around 3.5 miles away. Then there are more gasses that surround the solar system that maybe would stretch up to 5 miles away or more! Once you're out of all that, you're officially out of the solar system and into interstellar space.

If you want to know how far it would be to the nearest solar system from there, you are talking 12,000 miles away! Basically as far away as you can get on the other side of the world! And remember that is when the earth is a bb gun pellet and then sun is the size of a space hopper!

Answer 3

The simple truth is: NONE OF THE MAPS YOU HAVE EVER SEEN OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM WAS DRAWN REMOTELY TO SCALE.

Most schoolroom charts show the planets coming one after the other at neighborly intervals---the outer giants actually cast shadows over each other in many illustrations---but this is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same sheet of paper. Neptune in reality isn't just a little bit beyond Jupiter, it's WAY beyond Jupiter---five times further from Jupiter than Jupiter is from us.

Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn't possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn't come close.

On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 meters away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometers distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway).

Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the full stop at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 meters away.

23 Dec 2006, 8:55pm, Philippines

Answer 4

If the earth was the size of an apple, the sun would be about the size of the New Orleans Superdome, and about 3 miles away.

Answer 5

Yes. Use a flake of graphite from a pencil to represent the earth. then pitch a baseball to Barry Bonds, have him hit it as far as he can. That's about how far away the sun would be if it were scaled down to the size of a baseball and the earth were the size of a dust particle.

Answer 6

I'd like to thank julie_t for that link above. What an excellent site, I've added it to my bookmarks.

Using that site, and taking approximately 4 cm as the average size of an apple, it gives the following measures:

Sun = 14.5 feet across

Size of Jupiter = 17.5 inches

Distance from Sun to Earth = 1558 feet (five football fields)

Distance to Pluto = 11.5 miles

Distance to Alpha Centauri = 80,000 miles (about one third of the distance to the moon)

Answer 7

This is a terrific question. My little boy is really into the stars and planets and I was trying to draw them on a piece of paper and I thought about whether it was possible to do this to scale. And it really isn't. I then did some calculation and got one of his squidgy, rubber balls, a bit bigger than a tennis ball (perhaps 10cm in diameter). The earth, in this scale, turned out to be a teeny piece of Blu-Tak 1mm or so in diameter. And the sun had to be about 10m away! Since each planet roughly doubles in distance as you go outward it's very difficult to conceive of them in scale. More should be done on this at school.

Excellent question. Thanks.

Answer 8

certainly no longer. no longer even close. to no longer sound mean in spite of the undeniable fact that it appears like your aeronautical engineering pal would not understand what he's speaking approximately if he's agreeing to this. in my view i'm an astrophysicist with a solid information of the two photograph voltaic equipment astronomy and particle physics in the two classical and the quantum international. This concept is thoroughly incorrect. in my view i've got chanced on that each and every thought and postulation relating to the atom by using all people who isn't a minimum of at a graduate point direction in college is thoroughly incorrect. Electrons do no longer orbit the nucleus. they have a statistical distribution that acts as a wave and that they obey regulations thoroughly distinctive than planets orbiting a sunlight. It appears like at maximum you have a intense college chemistry point information of atoms and that's very inadequate to make such egregious claims approximately atoms. in certainty there is unquestionably no reason our photograph voltaic equipment ought to have any quantity of planets. it ought to extremely have 2 or 3 or no terrestrial planets. i do no longer even understand what you mean by using newly formed atoms the two. Atoms do no longer newly form. they have constantly been around and that they're going to constantly be around. And the guy named "c", electrons can't be interior the nucleus. a minimum of no longer decrease than frequent circumstances. the only circumstances the place atoms even enter the nucleus is in neutron stars and then the electrons combine with protons so they isn't unfastened electrons interior the nucleus. jointly as your observations ought to be inspired, this concept is thoroughly incorrect.

Answer 9

I was going to give you the link that julie t posted, but she beat me to it.

Answer 10

It's big and we're small.