Relativity

If our Earth were a blue marble, about one inch in diameter, our moon would be about the size of a pea, about one quarter inch in diameter, and it would orbit our blue planet at a distance of about 30 inches...two and a half feet away from our one-inch marble.

Using this scale (in which one inch equals about 8,000 miles), our Sun would be a big ball slightly larger than 9 feet in diameter, and our little blue marble Earth would circle this ball at an average distance of about 970 feet, or more than three football fields.

With our 9-foot ball as the Sun at its center, our Solar System would be a circle a little more than 20 miles in diameter. It would only be 11 miles across if we just included the orbit of Neptune, the farthest planet; however, we must include the Kuiper Belt, a circling field of objects beyond the orbits of the eight planets in our system (recall that, in 2006, Pluto was demoted to a dwarf planet; it is the largest object in the Kuiper Belt).


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