Our solar system’s scale is something truly mind-boggling. Our home planet Earth alone is located over 92 million miles away from the sun. That’s not all; even on a much smaller scale, the distance between Earth and moon is around 240,000 miles.
It’s true the above-mentioned distances between different objects of our solar system are overwhelming. However, a group of filmmakers have recently created a video demonstrating the procedure adopted by them for building a scale model of our solar system. It’s basically a 7-mile long scale designed for making the scale of all major planets in our solar system and their respective orbits a bit more understandable.
In the video, Wylie Overstreet, a member of the team that created the model, said that the only method by means of which one can see the solar system’s scale model is by constructing one.
The makers created the model using a 7-mile long space in a desert in Nevada. It accurately maps out the orbits of all major planets that circle the sun.
The sizes of each planet (Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury) were represented by a light. After building the model, the team drove around the orbits of all those planets. The results thus obtained were quite dazzling. The viewers get to know the exact position of the planets in respect to each other as well as the sun.
Here, it must be mentioned that this is not the only scale model of our solar system. Planetary Society’s senior editor and planetary scientist Emily Lakdawalla informed that numerous scale models of our solar system have been created to date that demonstrate planets’ to-scale sizes and distances between their orbits. One of the biggest of these scales is in Sweden.
Lakdawalla added that what separates this new scale model from the others created to date is that this newly constructed model in not only showing distances between the planets in our solar system, but are also drawing the entire circular orbit of each planet. She said that so far she hasn’t come across any such scale model of the solar system. She is even not sure whether anything like that has at all been made before.
