Key
Phys 102 Astronomy
Name ____________________
SCALING
SOLAR SYSTEM
THE
TO THE
ONE-METER-DIAMETER SUN
To get an “intuitive” sense of the relative sizes of the sun and planets, and their separations, you are to scale down the solar system so that
the sun can be represented by a (large … 1m diameter) beach ball. Define the sun’s diameter as 100 cm. and use a scaling factor given by
Δ scale =
Scaled Size
122.00 cm
cm
=
== 8.7 × 10−5 km
True Size
1, 400, 000 km
( = 8.7 Exp
EE
Exp +/–
5)
Use the scientific notation key
for your calculator!
since (True Size) × Δscale = (Scaled Size). For the solar system objects and the star nearest Sol (Proxima Centauri) calculate their
scaled diameters and scaled distances to fill in the table below. Also name a common object that approximates the size of each
solar system body.
DIAMETER
DISTANCE
FROM
SOL
SCALED: (TRUE
× Δscale)
TRUE
SCALED
REPRESENTATIVE
TRUE
km
cm
OBJECT
km
cm
m
yards
SOL
1,400,000
122.0
BIG Beach Ball
MERCURY
4,800
0.42
BB
58 x 106
5054
50.5
56
VENUS
12,000
1.05
Blueberry
108 x 106
9411
94
105
EARTH
12,800
1.12
Blueberry
150 x 106
13071
131
145
MARS
6,800
0.59
Pea
228 x 106
19869
199
221
JUPITER
140,000
12.2
Grapefruit
778 x 106
67797
678
753
0.43
SATURN
120,000
10.5
Big Orange
1427 x 106
124353
1244
1382
0.79
URANUS
51,000
4.44
Golf Ball
2871 x 106
250187
2502
2780
1.58
NEPTUNE
49,600
4.32
Golf Ball
4497 x 106
391881
3919
4354
2.47
ALPHA
CENTAURI
≈ 1.2 RSol
≈ 150
Even Bigger Beach Ball
4.03 x 1013
NAME
The Following conversion factors will be helpful
1 meter = 1.11 yards
The diameter of the Earth is 7926 miles
and
and
miles
3.51E+09 3.51E+07 3.90E+07 2.22E+04
Earth
diam’s
2.74
1 yard = 5.68 x 10-4 miles
1 ly = 5.88x1012 miles (about 6 trillion miles … a l o n g way!)