WILLIAM & DEBORAH HILLYARDWILLIAM & DEBORAH HILLYARD

These tables give some idea of the approximate scale of the solar system, and puts into perspective its distance from some much more distant objects. 

Solar System -

Introduction


Object
Scale Diameter
in cms
Scale Radius
of Orbit
Sun 300
Mercury 1.00 116 meters
Venus 2.50 216 meters
Earth
    Moon
2.7
0.70
300 meters
76 cms from Earth
Mars 1.35 455 meters
Asteroid Belt             N/A c. 550 to 1,000 meters
Jupiter 28.50 1.56 km
Saturn 24.00 2.86 km
Uranus 10.16 5.74 km
Neptune 9.86 9.00 km
Kuiper Belt Objects: Pluto
SDOs & DOs
Oort Cloud
0.46 8.85 to 14.70 km
c. 10 to >64 km
c. 600to >16,000 km
Scale: 1:500,000,000
The model below scales the Sun as a globe 300 cms in diameter, with the Earth at 2.7 cms in diameter.  All the other distances are to this same scale.  Orbital radii are based on the semi-major axis except for Pluto, as its orbit is extremely eccentric.  
Object Scale Distance
   Diameter of the Sun A grain of sand, less
than 0.25 mm across
   Earth < 1/400th mm across,
< 2.5 cms from the Sun
Nearest Star (Proxima Centauri) 6.8 km from Earth
Diameter of Milky Way c. 160,000 Km
Andromeda Galaxy c. 4 Million Km from Earth
Lynx Arc Supercluster c. 64 Billion km from Earth
(comoving distance on this scale)
Scale: 1:6,000,000,000,000
This scale is approximately 1.6 km to 1 light-year.  In the model below, I have rescaled the Sun to be the size of a grain of sand; a little under a quarter of a mm across.  The Earth would be about the size of a bacterium!  In the real Universe, the Andromeda Galaxy, for example, is actually about 778 Kpc away.  That's over 24,000,000,000,000,000,000 kms away; and Andromeda is our nearest large galaxy! 
One last statistic.  If we scaled our entire solar system, out to the Kuiper Belt, to the size of a grain of sand. The Lynx Arc Supercluster would still be nearly 180,000 km away, and the comoving diameter of the observable Universe, to the same scale, would be represented by a sphere about 400,000 km in diameter (in reality, it is about 28 Gpc or 93 Billion Light-Years in diameter)

Models

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If you really need to, click here to view imperial units.