This amazing graphic was created by Roberto Ziche, showing our solar system up to scale. Sure, you know the Sun is much bigger than the other planets… but do you know how much bigger? Also, bonus points if you can find the Earth in the image below:
Roberto explains:
“At the Chabot Space and Science Center there were some old, poor quality images, probably downloaded from internet and printed on office paper, showing the Sun and the planets to scale. I found the images content to be extremely interesting, but the design and quality was definitely something that could have been improved. I decided to give it a try, and create a brand new, more artistic view of our solar system, poster size (36″ x 36″), and donate it to the Center to replace those old prints.
The 3D geometry was not too complex, but there was a lot of lighting experimentation to get the scene illuminated only by the Sun itself, and some time consuming multi-layer composition in Photoshop.”
He was also nice enough to make the image available as a high-resolution download – you can get the 27.1 mb PNG version here.
But our Solar System is not just planets, there’s also a lot of empty space – and I mean a LOT of empty space. Just in the space between the Earth and the Moon, you could sneak in all the other 8 7 planets (sorry, Pluto), with a decent amount to spare:
But if you think that our Sun is big… you need to watch this video, and see how it fares compared to the largest stars we have found in the Universe: