If the Earth were a pea - 20 September 2010 |
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If the Earth were a pea, the Moon would be a breadcrumb just off the edge of your plate.
Venus, the nearest planet to the earth, would be another pea, but you’d be lucky to see it, as it would never be closer than about 25 metres away. Mercury, the next nearest planet, would be impossible to spot – a shrivelled peppercorn at the other end of your neighbour’s Olympic-sized swimming pool. You’d certainly be able to see the Sun – a large ball about the size of a space hopper (appropriately enough) lying in the front garden of the house about ten doors down the road. But you’d need binoculars to see Mars – a lentil 120 metres down the road.
Beyond Mars lies the Asteroid Belt, a band of millions of microscopic dust particles stretching around you in a rough circle about 500 metres in diameter. But don’t get too excited – most of them would be too small to see even close up with a microscope. If you were to gather them all together into a single lump, it would be about the size of a grain of salt.
The next significant object would be Jupiter, a tennis ball about a quarter of a mile away, slightly larger than Saturn, a pool ball another quarter of a mile beyond that. Uranus and Neptune would be two golf balls about 1 mile and 1.5 miles away respectively. Pluto doesn’t technically count as a planet according to the latest definitions, but it’s still there – another breadcrumb twice as far away as Uranus.
That’s pretty much it for the solar system. There are lots of microscopic bits and pieces, of course, but nothing worth writing home about. However, the rest of the universe has plenty of surprises in store, provided you’re prepared to travel. For example, the next nearest significant objects are a cluster of three stars – roughly the size of a space hopper, a beach ball, and a football – known collectively as Alpha Centauri. Unfortunately they’re a bit of a trek – roughly 13,000 miles away, to be precise. That’s about as twice the diameter of the earth – the real earth, that is, not the pea on your plate.
I’ll leave you to imagine how far away everything else is.
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Posted by Steve Jeffery · Topics: Minister's Blog