eCosmology

How far is the illustration of our solar system right?

My kid just asked me this: he seems very excited that the planets are so close together and all the asteroids bunched up close. Of course the picture is two covers long, but in reality what sort of distances are we looking at?

Public Comments

1. http://www.phrenopolis.com/perspective/solarsystem/index.html the distances are huge.... and the asteroids are not bunched up.... http://www.noao.edu/education/work/Peppercorn/Peppercorn_Main.html several 'actual' renderings have been set up wherein they require several city blocks to represent distances!!... that last one is done in 'paces' and it's still amazing!!...
2. The planets are very small and far apart and not bunched up at all. The sources give some very interesting projects you can do to setup a true scale model of the solar system, and if you do that you will be shocked at how small and far apart the planets are. For example, if the Sun were a basket ball, Earth would be a very small pea or large pinhead about 90 feet away!
3. The planets are not so close together, and the Sun is not at the center of Earth's orbit.
4. The distances are vast. It is not in fact possible to draw a scale diagram of the solar system in which the sizes of the planets and their distances are both scaled correctly by the same factor and have it fit in a book. I once made a scale model of the solar system using a tennis ball as the Sun. I did it out on a camping trip in a large field. I couldn't actually fit the whole thing in the field, despite using such a small object for the Sun. Not only that, the inner planets were no more than small dots at that scale. The Sun is about 1.4 million kilometres across, and is 150 million kilometres away. Saturn is about a *billion* kilometres away. The distances truly are vast.