Download Solar System Scaled Down: Lesson on Proportions

SOLAR SYSTEM PROJECT
Earth Space Science 2013
Space, Putting it into Perspective
The purpose of this project is to educate and illustrate about our solar system. We need to put the
distances into a scale model to give us a sense of the proportion of our universe. This project will
be to show the relative distances in the solar system.
*An astronomical unit (abbreviated as AU, au, a.u., or sometimes ua) is a unit of length equal
to about 149,597,870.7 kilometres[1] or approximately the mean Earth–Sun distance.
{Wikipedia}
Light travels at 3.0 x 108 m/s
Planets
Mercury
Venus
Earth
Mars
Jupiter
Saturn
Uranus
Neptune
Pluto
SUN
Distance from Distance from Time for light 1.25 AU/m
Sun (km)
Sun (AU*)
from Sun (s)
193s
58,000,000
0.39
3.2 minutes
360 s
108,000,000
0.72
6 minutes
500 s
150,000,000
1.00
8.3 minutes
760 s
228,000,000
1.52
12.7 minutes
2593 s
778,000,000
5.19
43.2 minutes
4757 s
1,427,000,000 9.51
79.3 minutes
9570 s
2,871,000,000 19.14
159.5 minutes
14990 s
4,497,000,000 29.98
250 minutes
19710 s
5,913,000,000 39.42
328.5 minutes
5.5 hours!
---
Hallway
Distance (m)
0.49 m
0.9 m
1.25 m
1.9 m
6.49 m
11.89 m
23.93 m
37.48 m
49.3 m
Questions
1. What is a light year? ____distance travelled by light in one year________
2. How fast does light travel? _300, 000 ,000____ m/s ____300 , 000_ km/s
3. How long does it take light to travel 1.0 AU (from the Sun to Earth)? ________
T = d/v = 150 ,000 ,000 / 300 ,000 = 500 s or 8.3 minutes
4. How long does it take light to travel from the Sun to Pluto? ______________ Complete the
table for all the planets.
5. How far is a light year in kilometres?
D=v*t
= 300, 000 km/s * 60 s/min * 60 min /hr * 24 hr/day * 365 day/year
= 9 460 800 000 000 km !
6.Given the length of the third floor hallway what is an appropriate scale to use to
get the entire solar system represented? Calculate the distance in meters to each of
the planets using this scale.
Length of TSS 3rd floor hallway 50 m
40 AU = 50 m
1m = 50/40 AU
= 1.25 AU / m
The NEAREST Star Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light years from the Sun
7. How far away is it in kilometres? 3.973 * 1013
39 730 000 000 000
39.7 trillion km!!
3.973 * 1014 km (signal from 1970, 42 light years)
8. How far from the Sun would Proxima Centauri be placed on our Hallway model?
39.7 trillion km / 150,000,000 km / AU = _264.67 AU
1.25 * _264.67_ AU = 330.83 km (near Kingston !!)
Diameter of Solar System Objects
Relative Scale
Planets
Mercury
Venus
Earth
Mars
Jupiter
Saturn
Uranus
Neptune
Pluto
SUN
Diameter
(km)
Number of
times into the
Sun
4900
286
12,000
116.7
12,760
110
6,800
206
143,000
9.8
120,000
11.7
52,000
27
50,000
28
2,300
609
1,399,830
1.0
Scaled by SUN
Scaled by
Pluto
0.125 cm (1.25 mm)
2.1 cm
0.31 (3.1 mm)
5.2 cm
0.33 cm (3.3 mm)
5.5 cm
0.17 cm (1.7 mm)
3 cm
3.7 cm
62 cm
3.1 cm
52 cm
1.3
22.6 cm
1.29
21.8 cm
0.06 cm (0.6 mm)
Marble
1 cm diameter
609 cm OR
6.09 m
Large beach ball
36 cm diameter
Use the size of a beachball (36 cm) for the sun and determine the size of all other objects then
use a marble (1cm) for Pluto and do the same