The Solar System Looks Nothing Like You Think（原声文稿）

You've probably never seen an entirely accurate picture of the solar system in your entire life.

Distances like this are just too much for our brains to handle.

We can eyeball the distance to a running wild boar, but the distance to Neptune, we might know it in kilometers or miles, but we can't really picture it.

That's why textbook diagrams squish down all the empty space and blow up the planets just so we can actually see something.

Take your classic textbook picture. On the left, a massive blazing sun.

Arcing away from it are the orbits strung into eight neat colorful little spheres. It's pretty. It's intuitive. And it's a complete lie.

The order of the planets is spot on.

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, a Neptune, but the sizes and distances are drawn to completely different, i .e. wrong, scales.

So let's grab a blank screen and try to draw it properly. No cheats. Let's start with the sizes.

We line up all the planets in a row. Mercury is a tiny little dot.

Venus is a bit bigger. Earth is almost the same size.

Next to it is Mars, slightly bigger than mercury.

And here's where the trouble begins. Because next up is Jupiter. It's this big.

To keep it from blocking our whole drawing, let's slide it up. But remember, its actual spot is right here.

Saturn is also a giant, so we push it up too.

That leaves Uranus and Neptune. They're smaller, so they fit into our line just fine.

But things get truly wacky when we try to add in our Sun.

Against the Sun, massive Jupiter, which could easily swallow all the other planets combined, turns into a pathetic little smudge.

And the Sun is about 109 times as wide as the Earth. So, yeah.

But let's forget about sizes for a second and use simple dots to mark the planets. Now we'll arrange them by their average distance from the Sun.

We put the Sun on the far left edge of the screen and Neptune on the far right. So where are the rest?

Here's Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars.

And those three dots huddled right up against the Sun. That's the Earth, Venus, and Mercury.

But that dot on the left only marks the Sun's position, not its actual size.

So now let's use the same scale for both sizes and distances. Let's say we make the Sun a 10 pixel disk. Let's see where the planets end up now.

Between the Sun and the Earth, you can fit about 108 of those disks.

We draw them side by side, touching each other, and only way out here does the Earth finally appear.

Mars still fits towards the right edge, but Jupiter and everything beyond it are off the screen.

To stretch this scale all the Neptune, you'd have to line up almost 17, 1920 pixel monitors in a row.

And with a sun of that size, Earth's diameter is less than a tenth of a pixel.

If you zoom the whole picture out so Neptune fits on one screen again, the planets just vanish. You wouldn't be able to see them at all.

On a single screen, the planets disappear. So let's build a model big enough to see them. system.

In 2015, two dudes named Wiley Overstreet and Alex Goraj built exactly that and filmed it for a YouTube video called To Scale the Solar System.

The planet's sizes and the distances between them were all to the same scale.

To pull it off, even a football field wouldn't cut it, not even a massive city park.

These These guys had to drive all the way to Nevada out onto a perfectly flat dry lakebed in the Black Rock Desert.

They took a standard glass marble, that was the Earth.

To keep the scale honest, the Sun had to be a weather balloon roughly 5 feet across.

To shoot the whole thing, they needed about 7 miles of completely empty space, 7 miles of dead, cracked earth, and somewhere out there lost in that colossal void sat eight tiny little planets. But they didn't just leave them on the ground.

They strapped lights to their cars, waited for nightfall, and drove along the orbits they'd mapped out around that glowing balloon.

They filmed the whole thing as a time lapse from a nearby mountain.

And in the footage, you finally see exactly what we couldn't fit on our screen, a terrifying colossal emptiness where there's almost nothing at all.

So obviously, you can't see a model like that on a normal page. And out here it took up a massive chunk of desert.

But honestly, you still can't really grasp the scale just by looking at it.

So, how long would it actually take to fly across all of that empty space?

Let's start with a regular commercial airplane flying at about 560 miles or about 900 kilometers per hour.

If you pointed that plane at the moon with no stops and no refueling, the trip would take almost 18 days.

To reach the sun, however, you'd have to give up 19 years of your life.

And that's just to reach the center of our own system.

For comparison, light covers the distance to the moon in about 1 .3 seconds, and to the sun in 8 minutes and 20 seconds.

Okay, planes are clearly way too slow for space. What about the fastest tech we've got?

The fastest object ever built by humans is the Parker Solar Probe.

it managed to hit speeds of nearly 430 ,000 miles per hour.

That's about 690 ,000 kilometers per hour for you metric nerds.

At that insane speed, a trip to Neptune would take only about nine months. But there's a catch.

The Parker Solar probe only reaches those speeds near its closest approach to the Sun as the Sun's gravity accelerates it along its orbit.

That's not a constant cruising speed a ship can use to just pack up and head for the stars.

If we really want to see how far we've managed to send working hardware, we have to look at Voyager 1.

It's the most distant human -made object in history and it's been coasting away from Earth for about 50 years now.

Its speed is about 11 miles or 18 kilometers per second.

Just for some context, A bullet from a high -end sniper rifle travels at maybe 0 .6 miles or about one kilometer per second.

Voyager is coasting through space roughly 17 times faster than that sniper rifle bullet. And do you know where it is right now?

It's now more than 15 billion miles from Earth, roughly 170 times the distance between us and the sun.

That is, so far away that a radio signal traveling at the speed of light takes nearly a full day just to reach the probe.

Engineers on Earth send a command. The signal flies through absolute nothingness for almost 24 hours.

The probe receives it, does its thing, and sends a confirmation that takes another 24 hours to get back again.

plan. You're looking at almost two days just for a basic ping.

Seeing immediate results and tweaking a command if something goes wrong is physically impossible, which is why they have to plan every single move way in advance.

But if we jump back to our desert model where the sun is a five foot balloon, Voyager has only traveled about 17 miles from it.

Voyager left the planets behind a long time ago.

It's also crossed the heliopause, the boundary of the solar wind bubble.

It's now officially flying through interstellar space, even though it still has a long way to go to actually clear the outer edges of the solar system.

Up ahead is the Oort cloud, a theoretical massive shell of icy debris loosely bound by the sun's gravity.

So, no one has ever observed the cloud directly.

Astronomers inferred existence from the orbits of long period comets.

Estimates suggest Voyager won't reach its inner edge for centuries, or its outer edge for tens of thousands of years.

Miles and kilometers don't work out here anymore.

For distances like this, we need a new ruler, the light -ear. And no, it's not a measure of time.

is the distance that light moving at roughly 186 ,000 miles or 300 ,000 kilometers per second can travel in one Earth year.

In hard numbers, that's about 5 .9 trillion miles or about 9 .5 trillion kilometers.

After nearly 50 years, voyagers still just under one light day away from Earth.

The nearest star beyond the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4 .2 light -years away.

For Voyager to cover that distance at its current speed, it would take around 75 ,000 years.

Or for you metric nuts, also 75 ,000 years.

Ok, let's go back to our desert with the 5 -foot sun balloon one more time.

On that scale, Proxima Centauri would sit about 27 ,000 miles away, or something more in kilometers.

You do the math. That's longer than the entire circumference of the Earth.

If we wanted to just place the closest neighboring star into our model, we'd run out of planet.

Building a more powerful rocket to get there faster brings us face to face with the infamous and diabolical Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, the biggest headache in all of spaceflight.

To fly faster with the same type of engine, you need to carry more fuel, but that fuel has extra mass.

To lift and accelerate the mass of that extra fuel, you need even more fuel, and the amount of fuel you need grows exponentially. You can't just hit the brakes when you get there either.

If you want to slow down, using your own engine, you have to lug all that breaking fuel with you right from the start. Big pain in the butt.

You have to also accelerate all the fuel you'll eventually need to slow down, and that also takes huge amounts of extra energy, i .e. even more fuel.

So with our current chemical rockets, interstellar travel turns into an engineering nightmare.

So, we can't fly there, which means we're going back to the drawing board.

Only this time we're going to try and draw the entire galaxy.

Do you know that famous picture of the Milky Way with the little you are here arrow?

If you don't, it's an image from NASA and JPL Caltech created by artist Robert Hurt.

The problem is, nobody has ever actually photographed our galaxy from the outside because we're stuck deep inside it.

the image is a scientific reconstruction based on observational data. Astronomers are still actively tweaking the details of this map.

But matching up the real sizes and distances on it still won't work.

The Milky Way is a disc about 100 ,000 light -years across.

Let's shrink the whole thing down to the size of a standard 12 -inch vinyl record. Now let's turn our model sideways.

The thickness of the thin stellar disc is around a thousand light years.

On our scale, that's about an eighth of an inch, or about three millimeters.

Proportionally, it really is a lot like a vinyl record, even if the galaxy is noticeably bulging in the middle.

So how big does our supposedly massive sun get on this scale?

Well, it shrinks down to about half picometer.

That's hundreds of times smaller than a typical atom. Mind blown.

And that, you are here arrow, it only points to our general neighborhood.

Showing the actual sun on a map like this is impossible.

It's far smaller than even the thickness of the line used to draw that arrow.

At this scale, a single light year becomes about 3 micrometers.

And a micrometer is, by the way, 1 millionth of a meter.

The distance to our closest neighboring star, Proxima Centauri, is about 12 .8 micrometers.

That's roughly the thickness of household plastic wrap.

And yet, out in real space, you could cram nearly 29 million suns side by side into the gap between us and Proxima.

Now let's mark the pillars of creation on our record.

You know these from those iconic Hubble and Webb telescope photos.

They're located in the Eagle Nebula about 6 ,500 light years away from us.

In those photos they dominate the entire frame.

The longest of those pillars stretches for about four light years.

On our vinyl record, that would be a microscopic scratch just 12 micrometers long, sitting less than an inch away from the sun's marker.

Without a microscope, you wouldn't even be able to see those massive clouds.

Now, what What about Andromeda, the nearest major spiral galaxy?

That's 2 .5 million light years away.

On this scale, it would be about 25 feet away and noticeably bigger than our 12 inch Milky Way record.

The light astronomers are catching in their telescopes from Andromeda right now. That light started its journey 2 .5 million years ago.

So, back on Earth, our distant ancestors were using primitive stone tools.

But our record and Andromeda aren't just floating in a total void.

Let's pull back even further and try to look at Laniakia, the supercluster that our galaxy calls home.

The name translates from Hawaiian as immense heaven.

In 2014, astronomers mapped out this region based on how galaxies move.

Laniakia holds about 100 ,000 galaxies and stretches across roughly 520 million light years. The Milky Way sits right on its outskirts.

In our model where the Milky Way is a 12 -inch record, this colossal supercluster would span an area about a mile across.

Spread out across this mile -wide territory are disks of all different sizes and one of them is our Milky Way.

And even that is still just our local neighborhood.

The diameter of the observable universe is now about 93 billion light years. That sounds impossible at first.

How can the diameter be 93 billion if the universe itself is only 13 .8 billion years old?

Well, while the light from those distant regions was traveling towards us, space itself was expanding and the distance to the light source grew along with it.

And that's just the observable universe, the part where blight has actually had enough time to reach us.

Nobody knows the true size of the entire universe beyond that edge.

Anyway, this observable region is a vast three -dimensional cosmic web with hundreds of billions of galaxies these strung along its filaments.

If we keep pushing our model, where the entire Milky Way is a 12 inch vinyl record, the diameter of the observable universe stretches out to about 176 miles, or about 283 kilometers.

But the second you try to cram all those miles or kilometers into a single frame, you hit that exact same wall.

You have to mark individual galaxies as simple dots.

You can show the overall structure, but actually seeing the galaxies themselves, forget about it.

Designer Josh Worth tried to get around the problem we started with and built an honest two scale solar system on the web.

Obviously, it didn't fit one screen.

He made a site called If The Moon Were Only One Pixel, a ridiculously long horizontal page.

If you try to scroll to Pluto the normal way, you'll spend minutes dragging past almost nothing but empty space, and the moon there is literally one pixel.

Over in Sweden, they took this same idea and stretched it across an entire country.

The Sweden Solar System is the world's largest permanent scale model of our cosmic neighborhood.

The sun is played by the Avicii Arena, a massive, spherical building in Stockholm.

The planets, properly scaled, are scattered all over the country.

Earth is a 26 -inch globe sitting in the Museum of Natural History, about 4 .7 miles or 7 .5 kilometers away from the arena, and Pluto.

Pluto is in a totally different town, 300 kilometers or 186 miles away. way.

Musician and artist Pablo Carlos Budasi managed to create a logarithmic map of the observable universe. Our solar system is dead center.

The further out to the edges you go, the more intensely the distances are compressed.

Otherwise, you'd never be able to fit billions of light -years onto a single image. image. But let's look at real photographs.

On February 14th, 1990, Voyager 1, about 3 .7 billion miles, or about 6 billion kilometers away from the sun, turned its camera around and snapped a series of 60 frames.

They stitched them together to create the family portrait, a mosaic featuring six planets of our solar system.

It's the first and so far the only family photo we have like this.

Among those images is the famous pale blue dot.

Earth takes up less than a single pixel on it.

The just 2 .9 nanometers across comparable to the width of a DNA double helix.

Nanometers? Nanometers?

I think it's nanometers. It's got to be.

We started this video trying to squeeze eight planets in the spaces between them onto a single screen.

That desert model needed seven miles of open space to be just 2 .9 nanometers across comparable to the width of a DNA double helix.

No, nanometers. Why do I keep doing that wrong?

But with the Milky Way shrunk to a 12 -inch record, the region containing all eight planets would be just 2 .9 nanometers across comparable to the width of a DNA double helix.

So while you're digesting those numbers, drop a comment down below and tell us which fact blew your mind the most.

And share this video with a friend so they can sit there also staring blankly at a wall for a little while too.