Astronomy magazine has a neat little article in their current issue that even non-Astro buffs could appreciate. It’s one of those scale things. You know: if the Sun is a basketball, then Neptune would be a marble forty feet away. That sort of thing.
So check this out. This is the first time I ever heard this idea, and it’s kinda enlightening. You know what the Milky Way is, right? Our galaxy. A massive pinwheel-shaped spiral conglomeration of billions of stars. It takes our solar system 250 million years to complete one revolution, that’s how big it is.
So check this out. This is the first time I ever heard this idea, and it’s kinda enlightening. You know what the Milky Way is, right? Our galaxy. A massive pinwheel-shaped spiral conglomeration of billions of stars. It takes our solar system 250 million years to complete one revolution, that’s how big it is.
Now for some scale.
Take the Milky Way and superimpose it upon a map of the United States. That’s what Astronomy did (basing their article off an idea from an American teacher and astronomer). Got it?
Let’s position the center of the Milky Way at the approximate center of the United States, Topeka, Kansas. Where would our solar system be located? Columbus, Ohio, 650 miles away.
All right. That’s not so enlightening. But this is.
On this map, our solar system would be two inches in diameter. Outta the whole continental US, we would take up something about the size of your bath tub’s drain. That’s something to file away in the back of the noggin’, no?
Now, consider this. In our sea-to-shining-sea scale model of the Milky Way, the size of the Sun would be …
See this
.
That period I just typed? Well, the Sun would be about a tenth of the size of that teeny tiny punctuation mark. Just plop it right in downtown Columbus and you have the approximate location and size of our scale model home star.
Neat, huh? And as a bonus factoid, just about every single star we can see with our naked eyes would lie within a 25-mile radius of Columbus. Out of an America-sized Milky Way some 3,000 miles across, we can only see our city and a couple of outlying suburbs.
File that away for the next time you happen to be having a drink with some friends out beneath the summer nighttime sky.
Take the Milky Way and superimpose it upon a map of the United States. That’s what Astronomy did (basing their article off an idea from an American teacher and astronomer). Got it?
Let’s position the center of the Milky Way at the approximate center of the United States, Topeka, Kansas. Where would our solar system be located? Columbus, Ohio, 650 miles away.
All right. That’s not so enlightening. But this is.
On this map, our solar system would be two inches in diameter. Outta the whole continental US, we would take up something about the size of your bath tub’s drain. That’s something to file away in the back of the noggin’, no?
Now, consider this. In our sea-to-shining-sea scale model of the Milky Way, the size of the Sun would be …
See this
.
That period I just typed? Well, the Sun would be about a tenth of the size of that teeny tiny punctuation mark. Just plop it right in downtown Columbus and you have the approximate location and size of our scale model home star.
Neat, huh? And as a bonus factoid, just about every single star we can see with our naked eyes would lie within a 25-mile radius of Columbus. Out of an America-sized Milky Way some 3,000 miles across, we can only see our city and a couple of outlying suburbs.
File that away for the next time you happen to be having a drink with some friends out beneath the summer nighttime sky.
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