Explore the Planets

More Vast Than You Would Believe…

When you were introduced to the solar system as a little kid, or perhaps you are one now, you were shown a lineup of the planets such as the one above. While this makes it easy to fit the planets on a textbook page, it is not even close to the reality of the sizes of the planets and how far they are from each other. Nothing in space is as close as you might think it is, and that includes our solar system.

First, out of the entire mass of everything in our solar system, the Sun takes up 99.8% of it. The other 0.2% includes the combined mass of all the planets and all of their moons, all of the dwarf planets, all of the asteroids and comets orbiting in the farthest reaches of the solar system, and everything in between. Here is a realistic model of the sizes of the Sun and the planets, not accounting for distances:

Jupiter is so big compared to the Earth that if you were to line up Earths across the width of Jupiter, you could fit about 11. If Earth were the size of a grape, Jupiter would be the size of a basketball. If you were to line up Jupiters across the width of the Sun, you could fit about 10. Do some simply multiplication and if you were to line up Earths one after the other across the diameter of the Sun, you could fit nearly 110. Now if the Earth was a grape, the Sun would be as big as a ball that an adult male could stand in.

We’ve considered how wide the Sun is, but what about its volume? How many Earths could we fit inside the Sun? The Sun weights about 330,000 times more than the Earth and is so big that 1,300,000 Earths could fit inside it. Although our Sun seems huge, there are stars out there that are unbelievably huge in mass and in size, making the Sun seem miniscule.

Here is a scary visualization of the amount of Earths needed to fill the volume of the Sun.

Now that we understand how big everything really is in the solar system, we should look at the vast distances between celestial objects in our solar system. Even the distance between the Earth and the Moon is huge.

• If you were to drive a car at a speed of 60 mph toward the Sun, it would take about 166 days.

• Based on size, if the Earth were a basketball, the Moon would be a tennis ball. In order to accurately represent the distance between the Earth and the Moon, the tennis ball would have to be 24 feet away from the Earth.

• You could fit 30 Earths in the distance between the Earth and the moon. You could also fit all of the solar system’s planets as well as the dwarf planets nicely in this distance.

How most people think of the Earth and the Moon

Reality

Even across these 239,000 miles, it only takes light about 1.3 seconds to reach us from the Moon. This means when we look at the bright moon at night, we are seeing it as it was 1.3 seconds in the past.

Light is extremely fast. It’s so fast that in only 1 second, which is less than the time it takes to go to the Moon, it could travel around the Earth 7.5 times. At this same mind-blowing speed, it takes light 8 whole minutes to reach the us from the Sun. This means that the Sun is 400 farther from the Earth than the Moon.

Fun Fact: The Sun is also 400 times bigger than the Moon. These proportions mean that the Sun appears as basically the same size in the sky as the Moon, allowing us to experience total solar eclipses every so often when the Moon passes between the Sun and the Earth.

Now let’s turn the Sun into a basketball this time. This would make the Earth a tiny bead that is situated 25 meters away from the basketball, or about half the width of a football field. Let’s jump a few planets over to Jupiter, the biggest planet in the solar system. Jupiter would be about an inch wide and 445 feet, or about 1.5 football fields away. Neptune, the farthest planet in the solar system, would be the size of an ant and would be half a mile away from the basketball. This is nearly 9 football fields from the basketball. Imagine trying to see the basketball from 9 football fields away. The Sun would appear 1/30 of the its size in Earth’s sky when viewed from Neptune. This also means that the same light that can travel 7.5 times around the Sun in a second would take 4 entire hours to reach Neptune from the Sun.

Size of the Sun as seen from different planets

Now that we have a better understanding of the sizes of solar system objects as well as the vast distances between them, I’m sure you understand why it is hard to make a model of the solar system with both accurate sizes and distances that will fit on a page or a screen. The relative sizes of the planets would make some too small to see with such a scale in distance and with so much space already taken up by the colossal Sun. Therefore, to give you a better picture, I can now only show you a model that considers the distances without taking size into account: