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Shrink down the universe

In the history of this humble little star watching column I’ve thrown a myriad of numbers at you about the sizes of the stars and planets available in our night sky and the tremendous distances between them. The numbers can get so big that it’s pretty much impossible to truly grasp their enormity. I sure struggle with these figures, and I’ve been into amateur astronomy just about all my life.

What you can do to get a mental handle on it is to scale down or miniaturize the universe so its size is a little easier to relate to. You can do that with things around your house. I especially like to go into my kitchen and use fruits, nuts and seasonings. First, let’s start out with the solar system. Put an orange on the kitchen table and make that our sun. In reality, our sun is nearly 900 thousand miles in diameter so we truly are scaling down!

The Earth on that scale would be a single grain of salt out of your saltshaker. The actual distance from Earth to the sun is about 93 million miles away. That’s so far that if you drove your car to the sun at a speed of 70 mph it would take you a century and a half to get there, and as you get closer and closer to our home star you better pray your car’s air conditioner is in good shape! So on our scale with the sun the size of an orange where do you suppose you should place the salt grain size Earth? Across the kitchen? The far end of the house? No, you would have to place it 30 feet away from the orange! At my house that would mean it would have to be out somewhere in the front yard! We’re just getting started, though.

Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, is 88,000 miles in diameter. On our scale, that would be about the size of a chocolate covered peanut. You would need to put it down the block from your house, about 200 feet away from the orange sized sun. Jupiter’s actual distance to the sun is about 500 million miles. A trip in your car from Jupiter to the sun at 70 mph would take you about 800 years, not including rest stops. Saturn, the next planet out from Jupiter, would be about the size of a plain peanut at about 400 feet away from the orange sized sun. Pluto, once considered the most distant planet from the sun and now demoted to a dwarf planet, would be the size of a speck of finely ground pepper and would have to be 10 blocks away! By the way, the actual average distance of Pluto from the sun is over three and a half billion miles, and it would take you about 6,000 years to drive from Pluto to the sun at 70 mph if your car and you could handle it!

Now let’s get stellar with our scale. One of the next closest stars to our sun is Alpha Centauri. It’s about the same size as our sun, so you could represent it with another orange. How far would the Alpha Centauri orange have to be from our sun orange? Time to blow your mind. It would have to be about 1,300 miles away! That’s roughly the distance from Marshall to Tallahassee, Florida! The actual distance to Alpha Centauri is about 25 trillion miles. Driving there at 70 mph would take you almost 41 million years.

So has your head exploded yet? If it hasn’t, consider this. There are at least a couple hundred billion other stars in our Milky Way galaxy. On our scale those stars would vary in size from prunes to giant pumpkins on steroids. Good luck getting all that produce together. If you could, though, you would need to space all your fruit stars about 2,000 miles apart from each other in a circle approximately 20 million miles in diameter! I don’t know about you, but my mind just exploded!

Oh, one more thing, our Milky Way galaxy is just one of billions and billions of other galaxies in our visible universe. Now, on our scale — forget about it!

Keep this brain exploding mental exercise in mind the next time you’re stargazing.

THREE WAY CELESTIAL HUGGING THIS WEEK: This week in the early Marshall evening sky you can see three planets really close together in the low southwestern sky. Two of them you can see with your naked eye; Mars and Venus. Venus is by far the brightest of the two, and in fact it’s the brightest star-like object in the early evening sky. It’s only about 34 million miles from Earth, which is just about the minimum distance to Venus. What’s really cool is to view Venus with a small telescope or even just a pair of binoculars. It will resemble a crescent moon. Venus and Mercury, planets that orbit the sun within our Earth’s orbit, go through phase changes just like the moon.

Mars isn’t nearly as bright as Venus but can be spotted with the naked eye just to the upper left of Venus, a little over ten degrees away. That’s a little over the width of your fist held at arm’s length. Even through a telescope, all Mars will really look like is a red dot because it’s so distant at 186 million miles away.

With even a small telescope, though, it’s possible to see a really far out planet, Uranus, over 1.9 billion miles away. Through even a smaller telescope it will appear as a bluish green dot. You can use Mars to find it. This week Uranus will be super close to Mars in the sky, less than one degree to the left of Mars. The famous English astronomer William Hershel first discovered Uranus with his telescope. He originally called it “George” in honor of the king of England. Later the name was changed to Uranus after a Greek god. See if you can spot George.

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul and is author of the book, “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications available at bookstores at http://www.adventurepublications.net.

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