HoodaThunk?

Most of us learned about our solar system in grade school and, science geeks like myself aside, we don’t really think about it too much after we’ve passed those tests. Even though the past few years have seen numerous discoveries of new solar bodies and the reclassification of Pluto from planet to the newly-created “dwarf planet” category, most folks simply don’t care about any planet beyond this one. One of the reasons might be that the whole concept of what the solar system looks like is outside the experience and referents of the ordinary citizen. One of Loudoun’s teachers and his supporters are looking to change that. They want to build a scale model of the solar system that’s actually to scale. Via The Loudoun Scoop we have this story in LoudounExtra:

If Rick Peck gets his way, the orbits of the planets would sweep around an arch 7 1/2 feet tall at Dominion High School in Sterling. A marble-size Pluto would lie two dozen miles away in Round Hill.

The solar system is that vast, which Peck says gets lost when textbooks crunch the whole thing onto one page. So the sixth-grade science teacher at Seneca Ridge Middle School has banded together with other teachers, parents and students to try to build a Loudoun County-size model.

I think this is a great idea and the ability to put these scale models of the planets on school grounds will help deploy it, if they can get the project approved. Typical representations of the solar system tend to be done so as to show the positions of the planets’ orbits in order but not in scale, giving a distorted view of the planets. That’s understandable when you consider what it would like. Again, from the story:

On paper, an inch-wide sun would render Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars invisible. Jupiter would be 3 millimeters wide — but 15 yards away. Neptune would be a millimeter wide and about a football field off the page.

That’s going to have to be a pretty big book to cover all of that. As it is, Peck’s model would represent the sun with just an arch; a slice of the whole orb. To keep it in scale with a marble representing Pluto located in Round Hill, about 24 miles away, a full-size scale model of the sun would be 34 feet in diameter. Earth, about the size of a softball in this model, would be at Meadowland Elementary, about a mile away. This kind of project can really bring home the kinds of distances we’re talking about on a solar scale. I wonder, at this scale, where the nearest star would be?

In any case, something to think about. Kudos to Mr. Peck for this.