@utahcornelius9704

6 months ago

This is beautiful and it does give you a sense of scale of the eight planets. Putting the asteroid belt there, and indicating the incredible width of that belt between Mars and Jupiter, would have been nice. Also, the suggestion that Neptune is the edge of the Solar System is incorrect. The distance from the Sun to Earth is 1 Astronomical Unit (AU). The distance from the Sun to Neptune is 30 AU. At Neptune begins the Kuiper Belt of comets. It's very wide, too. All that stuff orbits the Sun on a fairly flat plane. A bit beyond the Kuiper Belt is the Heliopause. This is where the Solar Wind ends. The solar wind is plasma emitted from the Sun's Corona, its outermost layer. That solar wind stretches about 123 AU from the Sun, another 90 AU beyond Neptune, at 30 AU. Then you enter interstellar space, which is still not the end of the Solar System. You cross that space for somewhere between another 880-1,880 AU. That's right, 1 AU to Earth. 30 AU to Neptune. 123 AU to Interstellar Space. And another 880-1,880 AU to...the Oort Cloud. The Oort Cloud is a collection of more comets which are out there in a sphere around the entire solar system. The Oort Cloud is hypothetical, but pretty much all astrophysicists and astronomers agree that it's there, because Oort Clouds exist around other socarl systems, and because you need an Oort Cloud to feed the Kuiper Belt, which in turn sends comets into the inner planet space inside the Asteroid Belt. Like the comets that pass or fall into Earth. Without the Oort Cloud feeding the Kuiper Belt, the Kuiper Belt would have run out of comets long, long ago. And it didn't. Well, that Oort Cloud then extends another 50,000 to 100,000 AU farther out into space. The outside of the Oort Cloud is where the SOLAR SYSTEM ENDS. That's where the Sun's gravitational pull runs out. So, from the Sun to Earth is 1 AU, to Neptune is 30 AU, and out of the Solar System is 50,000 to 100,000 AU THAT'S how big the Solar System is. And 1 AU from the Sun to the Earth is 93 million miles. I haven't done the math, but that map of the Solar System isn't 7 miles. It's about the size of the U.S. And that's just our tiny little solar system in a galaxy witha hundred billion stars. As Douglas Adams said in "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," "space is really big."

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