Going the Distance

I’m getting ready for a road trip, so I’ve been thinking about distances.

To drive across the USA takes around 45 hours. It’s a little over 3,000 miles to cross the country. That distance is greater than the diameter of the Moon. Our little companion is only 2100 miles in diameter.

Earth has a diameter of nearly 7,900 miles.

The Sun, on the other hand is 865,000 miles in diameter. You could line up 109 earths across the sun. No, you couldn’t they would burn up, but in theory….

So to recap our diameters:

Moon       2,100 miles
Earth       7,900 miles
Sun      865,000 miles

Think about how long it takes to fly around the earth, now imagine flying around the sun. It would literally take months to get around it.

But, those are the small numbers. Now lets talk about distance. (Distances are all averages because planets have elliptical orbits.)

The Moon is 238,900 miles from Earth. (When astronomers talk about a “near-earth” asteroid they mean anything within a million miles of Earth.)

The Sun is 93,000,000 miles away. That’s 93 million miles (makes the Earth’s 7,900 diameter seem pretty tiny). Astronomers call this distance 1 astronomical unit (technically 149,597,870,700 meters).

This block represents 1 AU, 93 million miles.

You realize space is pretty big when you look at how far we are from the other planets.

Mercury        57,974,000 miles          .61 AU

Venus              25,725,000 miles         .28 AU  Our closest neighbor at a mere 26 million miles away.

Mars               48,678,000 miles         .52 AU

Jupiter          390,674,000 miles         4.2 AU

Saturn         792,248,000 miles         8.52 AU

Uranus      1,692,663,000 miles        18.21 AU  Note that we are up to billions of miles now.

Neptune      2,703,960,000 miles         29.9 AU

I’m going to include Pluto because it once was a planet.

Pluto       4,670,000,000  miles       40AU

Remember the distance to Venus:

We are far away from Pluto and it blows my mind that humanity was able to send a craft out that far. But, that’s a skip in the pond compared with Voyager 1 which is 139 AU  or 10,137,000,000 miles (I’m not going to block it out) from Earth and still moving.

Our nearest neighbors, Alpha Centauri A and B, are around 4.22 light years away. That’s over 276,000 AU or 5,878,625,000,000 miles (that 5 is in the trillion spot, my friends).

Space is big.

For a great sense of scale check out this webpage: http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html and don’t forget to check out the light speed button in the lower right.

It makes my road trip feel like standing still!
Happy trails.