WASHINGTON: The solar system is huge. Neptune, technically the last planet in our solar system, is 2.8 billion miles away. But really wrapping your head around numbers that large is tough. What’s more, most representations of the solar system get the scale of the planets all wrong—when you’re talking about something 5.6 billion miles in diameter, even a massive planet like Jupiter (just 86,881.4 miles in diameter) is essentially a speck.
Filmmakers Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh set out to try to capture just how big the solar system is. To do it, they needed 7 miles of desert. When you shrink the solar system down to 7 miles, the sun is about 5 feet across. Jupiter is about the size of a cantaloupe. Our own planet is the size of a marble. And to get out to the furthest reaches of our solar system means clambering into a car and driving for a while.
There have been other scale model representations of the universe made before. The University of Wisconsin worked to build a bike path that put the universe at at 200 million to 1 scale that allowed riders to get a sense of how much emptiness there is in our cosmic neighborhood. A father and son built a scale model of the universe in Eugene, Oregon that was so popular the entire community banded together to make it a permanent installation. And Sweden built the largest scale model of the solar system ever, using the Stockholm Globe Arena to represent the sun, and lining up the planets at a 20 million to one scale. At this distance, the dwarf planet Pluto is 186 miles away.
For a scale model you can grok at your desk, Josh Worth’s website “If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel” (“a tediously accurate scale model of solar system,” as he puts it) let’s you scroll (and scroll and scroll and scroll) until you hit the outer limits of our solar system. And Alphonse Swinehart’s “Riding Light” video from earlier this year is a good introduction on how long it takes something traveling at the speed of light to actually exit our solar system—it takes the video 45 minutes just to reach Jupiter.
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