Understanding How Big The Solar System Is Is Easy With This Demonstration

Our brains have a really hard time understanding distance. Sure, we know how far away the street corner is from our apartment or how far away our grandma lives. But we see the Moon in our sky and we know it as this white glowing orb. Actually, the Moon is 385,000 kilometers away from Earth and that is really far! We can’t fathom just how big the solar system is, let alone the universe, and how tiny everything is in it.Show more

To help you understand just how big it is, we will try and bring everything to a bit smaller size. Let’s imagine our Sun is the size of a grapefruit. It’s at a size of 110 millimeters in diameter, which we will assume it is the same as the 1.4 million kilometers of the Sun.

At this grade, Mercury would be some 15 feet away from our grapefruit sun, an equivalent to the 59 million kilometers that is in real life, with the width of just four human hairs. Venus would be 8.5 meters from the Sun, which is 108 million kilometers. She would be just under a millimeter wide. Earth would be a blue dot measuring one millimeter, at a distance of 11.6 meters. Some 18 meters away from the Sun would be Mars, a tiny, half-millimeter speck, the size of a human egg cell.

After Mars comes the asteroid belt, some 23 to 46 meters out from the grapefruit Sun. When clumped together, it would be about 4% the mass of our Moon. Think of it as a grain of salt crushed and scattered around an orbit.

Jupiter might be the largest planet in our solar system, but in this presentation, it is just bigger than a centimeter. To scale, it would be 61 meters away from the grapefruit. Saturn would be 112 meters our from the fruity center of the universe, the equivalent of 1.4 billion kilometers. You can barely even see Jupiter from here!

The ice giants, Uranus and Neptune, are 226 meters 350 meters away from the Sun, respectively. If you are on Neptune, you can barely see Uranus! The outer ice giant orbits so slow around the slow, that it only made one revolution around it since we discovered it in 1846.

Pluto is a bit of a sore subject for us since it isn’t considered a planet anymore. He is in the Kuiper Belt, made up of frozen remnants of what once was the solar system, frozen chunks of methane and ammonia. He is so far away, his one year on Pluto is 250 years on Earth!

Now, do you have an idea of how big the solar system is?