The stops
- Shrink the solar system until Neptune’s path just reaches the far side of the Earth, then put the Sun in London. At this scale the Sun is a ball 5.6 km across, as wide as central London.
- The Earth goes round 600 km out, about as far as Frankfurt. It is only 51 metres across, the size of an office block, and the Moon circles it 1.5 km away, the size of a house.
- Mars is 900 km out, past Berlin, and 27 metres across. Mercury and Venus are nearer still, Mercury about as far as Manchester: every rocky planet fits inside Europe.
- Then a long gap. Jupiter, the giant, is 3,100 km out, in Cyprus: a ball half a kilometre wide, and nothing else for thousands of kilometres around it.
- Saturn is across the Atlantic, near New York: 5,700 km from the Sun in London, and 470 metres across without its rings.
- Uranus is in Jakarta, 11,500 km away and 200 metres across. Sunlight, the fastest thing there is, takes 2 hours 40 minutes to get there.
- Neptune, the last planet, is in New Zealand, 18,000 km from London: nearly the far side of the world. It is 200 metres across, and Voyager 2 took twelve years to fly there.
- And the nearest star after the Sun? At this scale it would be 160 million km from London, further than the real Sun is from us. Nearly all of space is empty.
Next
How big is Africa, really? Add country after country and watch how much of it still fits.