Half a mile long?
February 24, 2010 (Wednesday)
Find an 8 inch ball. Set it down on the ground. Let that ball represent the sun. Now walk a little over half a mile and push a pin into the ground. Let it be the smallest pin you can find, for the head will represent the planet Pluto. It’s the planet farthest away from the sun. Now go back to the 8 inch ball, the sun. Taking one yard steps, walk 26 paces and drop a peppercorn (0.08 inches wide) on the ground. That’s the earth. Actually the earth is 93,000,000 miles from the sun, which is 800,000 miles across. The earth is 8,000 miles wide.
Now gather up the other eight planets. Mercury and Mars, like Pluto, are pinheads. Venus, like the earth is a peppercorn. Neptune and Uranus are peanuts, Saturn is a hazelnut, and Jupiter is a pecan. The nine planets are placed like this, when the sun is an eight-inch ball: Mercury, 10 one-yard paces from the sun, Venus, 9 more, Earth, 7 more. Mars is 14 paces from the earth, and Jupiter, 95 paces from Mars. From Jupiter to Saturn, 112 paces. Saturn to Uranus, 249 paces. Uranus to Neptune, 281 paces. Neptune to Pluto, 242 paces. When you consider that each step represents 3,600,000 miles, that’s a lot of empty space.
The size of our solar system boggles the mind, doesn’t it? However, our sun with its nine (eight if you eliminate Pluto as some do), planets is only a tiny part of the Milky Way galaxy, a collection of suns, which is so far across that it must be measured in light years, rather than miles. A light year is the distance light travels in an earth year. Light moves at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across, and an average of 1,000 light years thick.
New discoveries are still being made. Now we know that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, many much larger than our own. The vastness of the universe outstrips the ability of our minds to comprehend it.
If you want to teach the size of the solar system, take the kids outside to a big park with an 8-inch ball, a pecan, peppercorns, peanuts, hazelnut and a few pinheads, and walk with the kids a half mile from the sun to Pluto.
Psalm 8: “What is man that thou are mindful of him?”
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