Extremely impressive, zoomable image of the Sun and planets of our Solar System to scale. Image also includes four out of five dwarf planets, and the orbital distances to the right. i.imgur/fjoPcBW.jpg (Source: Reddit) Interesting things that can be observed: - Size comparison of our Moon and Mercury. - Our Moon size to planet size ratio is much much bigger than other moons of other planets. (Except the Pluto-Charon pair) - Visualize how Jupiters Red Spot can be bigger than the Earth. - Sun spots bigger than the Earth. - That solar flare is almost the size of Jupiter. - The distance between Uranus and Neptune is larger than the distance from Sun to Saturn. - Out of the four dwarf planets, Haumea is the smallest and has an elongated shape because of its rapid rate of rotation. The spin actually distorted the planet and made it elongated. A day on Haumea lasts barely four hours, while a year is almost 285 Earth years. - Ceres, the fifth dwarf planet missing in this image, orbits between Mars and Jupiter. Related interesting trivia: - Gravity is splendid. Haumea is less than 1000km across and itself has two moons. - Speaking of powerful gravity, Jupiter has more mass than the rest of the planets combined. - The Suns mass constitutes almost 99.8% mass of the entire solar system. - The Sun isnt all that big, really. Its classified as a yellow dwarf. Heres another chart of star sizes in our galaxy: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Star-sizes.jpg Theres nothing like a beautifully intricate image, that probably took over a hundred hours of intensive labor to make, to remind us exactly how small and insignificant we are.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Nov 2014 02:58:52 +0000