Virtually every map or picture you’ve ever seen of the planets in our solar system has had one glaring flaw – it hasn’t been to scale. It’s not because we don’t know the proper scale. Rather the interesting bits, the planets, moons, comets, and even the sun, are insignificantly small compared to the overall system. So small that it’s extremely difficult to show them in their proper places relative to the overall system. Two recent attempts to do it required a vast expanse of Nevada desert in one case and millions of blank pixels in the other. Here are the links to the Nevada Desert Model and the one modeling the moon as a single pixel.
While these are certainly well done and definitely make it very clear how truly small the Earth is, they still boggle the mind – or at least mine. To simplify things a bit I found a picture of the planets as different fruits (courtesy of Nathan Yau and flowingdata.com).
Planets as fruit
This representation makes it very easy to understand the relative sizes of the planets, but it does leave out the sun. There’s a very good reason for that – the sun is enormous. It contains 99.8% of the mass of the solar system. Roughly 1.3 million earths would fit into the volume of the sun. Using the fruits from the picture above, the sun would need to be a fruit that’s 1.3 million times larger than a cherry tomato or ~1,700 times larger than a watermelon.
I did a quick search for the world’s largest fruits. While there are some enormous fruits and vegetables out there including a 268 pound watermelon, a 35 lb broccoli, and a 76 lb cabbage, the largest by far is a 2,230 lb pumpkin. This jack-o-lantern for a giant was nearly 20 feet in circumference. That’s still not big enough to represent the sun in the pictured model – it’s about 17 times too small.
All right if we revised the model and made the over one ton behemoth pumpkin our sun, what happens to the other planet/fruit representations? Using some very rough calculations, (yeah I conflate mass and volume a bit, but hey we’re already talking fruits and planets) Jupiter works its way down to an apple (Jupiter is 20 times larger than Uranus so maybe it’s a big apple). Since 763 earths fit into Jupiter, the Earth needs to get much smaller, too. Fortunately, the ratio of Earth to Mercury is very close to our 17 times reduction (it’s ~18) so we can replace the cherry tomato with a peppercorn.
Well if that little trip through fruits, vegetables, planets, and space caught your fancy, then you should consider following this blog.
As always thanks for reading.
Armen
Puts it all into perspective seeing them laid out like this. Thanks.
As always, I appreciate your kind indulgence, thanks for reading.
Absolutely fascinating! So . . . the solar system is, in fact, like one big fruitcake. And, I had no idea the sun was THAT much bigger.
Rick – it’s a fruitcake, but with a lot of empty space between the fruits.