هي سبق Local Solar System فاؤنڊيشن ٽيم جي هڪ ميمبر طرفان تيار ڪيو ويو ۽ ان کي ڪنهن قابل جائزو وٺندڙ طرفان بهتر ڪيو وڃي ٿو. توھان ھن موضوع ۾ ماهر آھيو ڇا؟
پيماني تي هلو
پورو صفحو کوليوEverything here is at true scale: sizes and distances in the same proportion. Each pixel you scroll carries you ٣٬٠٠٠ km.
Keep scrolling. Every picture you have seen of the solar system squeezed this emptiness out.
Mercury is ahead, where sunlight is almost seven times stronger than on Earth.
Still nothing. You have crossed ١٦.٨ ملين km since مرڪي.
The sunlight passing you now left the Sun ٥ منٽ ٥ سيڪنڊ ago.
Earth is ahead. Watch how small home turns out to be.
مھينو is still ٥٨.٨ ملين km ahead.
A radio message from Earth takes between 3 and 22 minutes to reach Mars, depending on where the two planets are.
You could line up ٤٬٦١١ Earths side by side in the space you have crossed since زمين.
You are 14% of the way from مھينو to سيريس.
Still nothing. You have crossed ٥٣.١ ملين km since مھينو.
The sunlight passing you now left the Sun ١٧ منٽ ٦ سيڪنڊ ago.
سيريس is still ٧٩.٦ ملين km ahead.
You are inside the asteroid belt. Did you hit anything? On average the asteroids are about a million kilometres apart.
You could line up ١٢٬٤٩٧ Earths side by side in the space you have crossed since مھينو.
You are 17% of the way from سيريس to جوپيٽر.
Still nothing. You have crossed ١٢٢ ملين km since سيريس.
The sunlight passing you now left the Sun ٣٣ منٽ ٨ سيڪنڊ ago.
جوپيٽر is still ١٢٢ ملين km ahead.
You could line up ٢٣٬٨٤٦ Earths side by side in the space you have crossed since سيريس.
You are 10% of the way from جوپيٽر to زحل.
Still nothing. You have crossed ١٣٠ ملين km since جوپيٽر.
The sunlight passing you now left the Sun ٥٤ منٽ ٥ سيڪنڊ ago.
زحل is still ٣٨٩ ملين km ahead.
Voyager 1 took about 20 months to fly from Jupiter to Saturn.
You could line up ٣٠٬٥٢٩ Earths side by side in the space you have crossed since جوپيٽر.
You are 70% of the way from جوپيٽر to زحل.
Still nothing. You have crossed ٥١٩ ملين km since جوپيٽر.
The sunlight passing you now left the Sun ١ ڪلاڪ ١٦ منٽ ago.
اورانوس is still ١.٣١ بلين km ahead.
You could line up ٢٠٬٦٠٥ Earths side by side in the space you have crossed since زحل.
You are 27% of the way from زحل to اورانوس.
Still nothing. You have crossed ٥٢٥ ملين km since زحل.
Uranus orbits twice as far from the Sun as Saturn. The farther out you go, the emptier it gets.
The sunlight passing you now left the Sun ٢ ڪلاڪ ٣ منٽ ago.
اورانوس is still ٥٢٥ ملين km ahead.
You could line up ٨٢٬٤١٨ Earths side by side in the space you have crossed since زحل.
You are 82% of the way from زحل to اورانوس.
Still nothing. You have crossed ١.٣١ بلين km since زحل.
The sunlight passing you now left the Sun ٢ ڪلاڪ ٤٨ منٽ ago.
نيپٽن is still ١.٣٣ بلين km ahead.
You could line up ٣٤٬٨٤٠ Earths side by side in the space you have crossed since اورانوس.
You are 36% of the way from اورانوس to نيپٽن.
Still nothing. You have crossed ٧٤٠ ملين km since اورانوس.
Voyager 2 needed about three and a half years to cross this gap, from Uranus in 1986 to Neptune in 1989.
The sunlight passing you now left the Sun ٣ ڪلاڪ ٣٧ منٽ ago.
نيپٽن is still ٤٤٤ ملين km ahead.
You could line up ١٠٤٬٥١٩ Earths side by side in the space you have crossed since اورانوس.
You are 91% of the way from اورانوس to نيپٽن.
Still nothing. You have crossed ١٢٩ ملين km since نيپٽن.
The sunlight passing you now left the Sun ٤ ڪلاڪ ٢٤ منٽ ago.
The Kuiper belt: a ring of icy worlds so spread out that after Pluto, New Horizons flew close to just one of them.
پلوٽون is still ٩٠٦ ملين km ahead.
You could line up ٥٠٬٧٩٨ Earths side by side in the space you have crossed since نيپٽن.
You are 55% of the way from نيپٽن to پلوٽون.
Still nothing. You have crossed ٩٠٦ ملين km since نيپٽن.
New Horizons, one of the fastest spacecraft ever launched, took nine and a half years to reach Pluto. Sunlight gets to Pluto's average distance in about five and a half hours.
The sunlight passing you now left the Sun ٥ ڪلاڪ ١٥ منٽ ago.
پلوٽون is still ١٢٩ ملين km ahead.
Scroll down inside the frame to fly outward, or start the autopilot below.
Journey's end
Look back. That bright star is the Sun.
ڊيٽابيس (لکڻيءَ جو متبادل)
| دنيا | قطر | سج کان ويڪرو | سج کان روشني جو سفر وقت | px |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| مرڪي | ٤٬٨٧٩ km | ٠.٣٨٧ au | ٣ منٽ ١٣ سيڪنڊ | ١٩٬٣٠٣ |
| وينا | ١٢٬١٠٤ km | ٠.٧٢٣ au | ٦ منٽ ١ سيڪنڊ | ٣٦٬٠٧٠ |
| زمين | ١٢٬٧٤٢ km | ١ au | ٨ منٽ ١٩ سيڪنڊ | ٤٩٬٨٦٦ |
| مھينو | ٦٬٧٧٩ km | ١.٥٢ au | ١٢ منٽ ٤٠ سيڪنڊ | ٧٥٬٩٨١ |
| سيريس | ٩٣٩ km | ٢.٧٧ au | ٢٣ منٽ ٠ سيڪنڊ | ١٣٧٬٩٠٧ |
| جوپيٽر | ١٣٩٬٨٢٢ km | ٥.٢ au | ٤٣ منٽ ١٦ سيڪنڊ | ٢٥٩٬٤٤٧ |
| زحل | ١١٦٬٤٦٤ km | ٩.٥٤ au | ١ ڪلاڪ ١٩ منٽ | ٤٧٥٬٥٥٥ |
| اورانوس | ٥٠٬٧٢٤ km | ١٩.٢ au | ٢ ڪلاڪ ٤٠ منٽ | ٩٥٦٬٨٨٦ |
| نيپٽن | ٤٩٬٢٤٤ km | ٣٠.١ au | ٤ ڪلاڪ ١٠ منٽ | ١٬٤٩٩٬٤٦٥ |
| پلوٽون | ٢٬٣٧٧ km | ٣٩.٦ au | ٥ ڪلاڪ ٢٩ منٽ | ١٬٩٧٤٬١٢٥ |
Almost every picture of the solar system lies. To fit on a page, the planets are squeezed together and blown up in size. Walk it at true scale and you discover the real star of the show: empty space.
The solar system is mostly empty space, and that emptiness is the whole story.
Look
Most pictures of the solar system squeeze the planets together like beads on a string, and draw them far too big. They have to: at true scale, a page would be almost completely empty.
Guess first: if the Sun were a beach ball, how far away would Earth be? A step? A room? A street?
A street. With the Sun as a 1-metre ball, Earth is a 9 mm pea about 107 metres away: roughly the length of a football pitch. Keep that picture in mind as you travel.
The Scale Walk above is drawn at true scale: sizes and distances in the same proportion. Every pixel you scroll carries you 3,000 km. Scroll inside the frame, press Next world, or tap a planet on the journey map at the top.
- The journey map is to scale too. The white marker is you. Notice how the Sun and the four inner planets crowd together at the far left.
- The odometer counts kilometres and the time sunlight has needed to get where you are.
- When you stop near a world, the camera locks on and leans in (the zoom is shown next to the scale bar), and a card tells you where you are.
- Earth, a globe 12,742 km across, is almost 50,000 scrolled pixels from the Sun. Neptune is about 1.5 million pixels away.
Notice how much of the trip is just black, with only a few lines of narration drifting past. That is the real solar system: tiny worlds separated by enormous emptiness.
Understand
A scale model divides every length by the same number. Here the number is 3,000: 3,000 km of real space becomes 1 pixel.
| World | Real diameter | Diameter at 1 px = 3,000 km | Distance from Sun | At this scale |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sun | 1,391,400 km | 464 px | 0 | 0 |
| Earth | 12,742 km | 4 px | 149.6 million km | 49,866 px |
| Jupiter | 139,822 km | 47 px | 778.3 million km | 259,437 px |
| Neptune | 49,244 km | 16 px | 4,498 million km | 1,499,000 px |
A handy comparison uses the Sun as a 1-metre ball. Divide everything by the Sun’s diameter (1.39 million km):
- Earth is a 9 mm pea, 107 m away.
- Jupiter is a 10 cm grapefruit, 560 m away.
- Neptune is a 3.5 cm marble, 3.2 km away.
- The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, would be another ball about 29,000 km away: more than two thirds of the way around the real Earth.
Try the autopilot at 1×, the real speed of light. You move 100 pixels per second, which feels slow on screen. Real sunlight really does need 8 minutes to reach Earth and more than 4 hours to reach Neptune. The faster settings compress time, not distance: the autopilot still brakes and pauses at every world.
Guess first: scrolling with a mouse wheel, are you moving faster or slower than light?
Much faster. A brisk scroll carries you millions of kilometres per second, often ten or more times the speed of light; the speed readout under the odometer shows it. Even so, the outer planets take a long time to reach. That is how big the distances are.
Master
Two separate compressions distort normal diagrams: the size scale and the distance scale. The ratio of the Sun-Neptune distance (4.5 × 10⁹ km) to Earth’s diameter (1.27 × 10⁴ km) is about 350,000. A screen 1,000 pixels tall can resolve a range of about 1,000, so no single static image can show both the planets and their spacing. Interactive zoom, logarithmic axes or a scroll-length model like this one are the only honest options.
This is also why the orrery on this site offers two modes. Readable scale compresses distance with a square root (r_screen ∝ √r) and draws planets at fixed legible sizes. True scale is linear in both size and distance, so the planets shrink to sub-pixel dots.
The emptiness has consequences for spaceflight. Travelling between planets is not like driving between cities: the planets move, the distances are huge, and the energy cost depends far more on changes of speed than on distance. That idea, delta-v, is at the heart of the Navigator path.
A last scale fact: the asteroid belt, often drawn as a crowded field of rocks, is so sparse that spacecraft cross it without any special manoeuvres. The Kuiper belt beyond Neptune is emptier still.
ڪوشش ڪريو
Set the autopilot speed to 1× and press 'Travel at the speed of light'. Watch the light-time clock as you reach Earth: about 8 minutes 20 seconds. Before you look at the table, guess how long the same trip takes to Neptune, then check.
وڏي. چئلينج آهن جتي سکيا سٽون.
جلدي سوال
3 جلدي سوال. جيڪڏهن توھان صحيح آھيو ته ڏسڻ لاءِ جواب چونڊيو.
-
If the Sun were a ball 1 metre wide, about how big would Earth be?
- A A football
- B A grapefruit
- C About 9 millimetres, like a pea
- D About 1 millimetre
جواب ڏيکار
C. About 9 millimetres, like a pea The Sun is about 109 times wider than Earth, so 1 m ÷ 109 ≈ 9 mm.
-
At that same scale, how far away would Earth be from the 1-metre Sun?
- A About 1 metre
- B About 10 metres
- C About 107 metres
- D About 1 kilometre
جواب ڏيکار
C. About 107 metres 1 au is about 107.5 Sun diameters, so Earth would be a pea about the length of a football pitch away.
-
Why do most drawings of the solar system show the planets close together?
- A Because they really are close
- B Because at true scale the planets would be too small to see on the page
- C Because the drawings show the planets at their closest approach
- D Because of light pollution
جواب ڏيکار
B. Because at true scale the planets would be too small to see on the page
لائين ختم ڪريو
- تعامل سان راند ڪئي وئي
- درس پڙھو
- چيلنج پورو ڪيو
- ڪوشس پاس ڪيو
ھن اوزار تي پنھنجي ترقي کي بچائڻ لاءِ سکيا مڪمل طور نشان لڳاءِ.
سکيو پورو. ڀلو ڪيو!
اڳيون Days and years on each worldھن سکيا ۾ لفظ
سرچشما
- NASA NSSDCA Planetary Fact Sheet (diameters, distances)
- JPL SSD: Approximate Positions of the Planets (semi-major axes)
- NASA NSSDCA: Schoolyard Solar System scale model
هي سکيو CC BY-SA 4.0 لائسنس ٿيل آھي.