They Built a 7-Mile-Wide Scale Model of Our Solar System on a Dry Lakebed in Nevada
They Built a 7-Mile-Wide Scale Model of Our Solar System on a Dry Lakebed in Nevada
"As we got farther and farther away, the Earth diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you can imagine... seeing this has to change a man." - James Irwin, Apollo 15
If you search "Earth and Moon" or "solar system" on the Internet, you will get a lot of results displaying the model of our solar system, but if we really put them on a piece of paper, the actual sizes of these stars and planets will be so tiny that you wouldn't even see them. "To create a scale model with an Earth only as big as [a] marble you need seven miles (11 kilometers) of empty space," explains Wylie Overstreet in this video. Hence the Black Rock Desert in Nevada was the perfect spot to build the first real model of our solar system.
At a 7-mile-wide scale, the Sun is just 1.5 meters round, a size that one man can hold in his arms. Obviously, the Earth and other planets come even smaller to complete this awesome human-scale solar realm.
Video Credit: Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh