This To-Scale Model of the Solar System is Seven Miles Wide

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  • Source: www.youtube.com / Via: www.youtube.com

    Any time you look up a picture of the solar system, the distances and sizes of the sun and planets have to be drastically changed to make everything visible. That means we all have a really distorted idea of how big everything really is.

    A group of friends decided to fix this problem by making a fully to-scale model of the solar system, with a blue marble as Earth. And to do that, they had to travel to a dry lake bed in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada and set up the orbits across seven miles – and they didn’t even include the orbit of Pluto. (Poor Pluto.)

    Even with the inner planets where orbits are relatively close, they had to get in a car and drive some distance from the camp to set them up. Jupiter, roughly the size of a volleyball, is over half a mile away.

    The final time-lapse video of the orbits stretched across the desert with their tiny camp in the center is really awe-inspiring.

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