I got this idea in my head that I wanted to do a scale model of the solar system. It probably came from listening to the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast, a collaboration project celebrating the international year of astronomy. One of the podcasts was a woman talking about how she tried to make a model of the solar system as a kid, using string.
So late Thursday night, I insisted that Julia and I take an hour and a half out of our lives and replicate the astronomical system that gives us life. Julia was very understanding and patient, and she helped by making these drawings of the planets.
This is what Saturn looked like when we pinned it in position at midnight.
I need more projects that can be taken from conception to conclusion in the time between supper and going to bed.
I used the stopsign at 53rd and Clarkson as the scaled version of the sun, because you could still see it while standing four blocks away. By that scale, Jupiter and Saturn were roughly the size of baseballs, Earth was the size of a lima bean, and Mercury was pea-sized.
The scaled ratio was pretty stupendous. The fraction of size between the stopsign and the Sun was a number with a decimal followed by nine zeroes.
The terrestrial planets were close enough together that we could measure their relative position with a retractable tape measure. Here’s the view from Mars, about a block away from the stopsign or "sun."
It was a pretty cozy setup. I could feel like I understood how these billiard ball planets tucked into the warm envelope of the close solar neighborhood.
At this solar distance the scales are pretty easy to visualize. The Earth is visible, the Sun is visible, and you get a feeling for how difficult it would be to send a spacecraft the vast distances between planets.
Jupiter and Saturn were too far away to measure by hand, so we estimated their position using google maps. Here’s the view from Saturn.
Beneath the red arrow is a tiny, white car. The "Sun" is another two blocks behind that. You can only barely see it with the naked eye.
I spent some time standing by the scale drawing of Saturn, thinking about what it must be like to be that far from anything warm. The sun would be just a distant ember in the sky, the nearest planet a bare glimmer in the distance, and invisible for most of the orbital interaction.
Saturn was as far as we actually assembled our mock solar system, because that’s as far as Clarkson went.
But I continued to do some of the math. Pluto, which used to be a planet would fall somewhere in the Manor Rd neighborhood.
Julia and I speculated where we would have to place the nearest star on this scale. We thought it would be somewhere around Elgin or San Antonio.
This was totally wrong. Alpha centauri, the nearest star at 4.37 lightyears, by the "stopsign scale" would still be 22,000km away. That’s essentially on the exact opposite side of the world.
No wonder the mundane S/F people think that interstellar travel is so unlikely. I can hardly imagine the distance to Pluto, but the distance to the closest star, let alone the distance to all the other stars, dwarfs that.
It actually made me pretty depressed. It’s been a while since I’ve encountered a concept that was literally terrifyingly beyond human conception.
So of course I had to do the math to get an idea of how far the nearest galaxy was by this scale. Andomeda, which is 2.5 million light years away, by the "stopsign scale" would have to be placed out beyond the orbit of Pluto.
To put that in context, imagine that a microscopic version of me and Julia lived on the lima-bean sized Earth model. We would be 5.45×10-10 times smaller than the real us. The microscopic me decides to make a model of the solar system on a microscopic Clarkson Rd. At 5.45×10-10 scale, the entire solar system is too small to see, but you might be able to see a tiny glimmer of light on the other side of the lima-bean sized planet that is Alpha Centauri. The micro-me would then trek out to Manor Rd (using his spaceship presumably), and lay out a model of the Andromeda galaxy that would be roughly a third of a kilometer across in our world.
I try not to think too hard about that.