Quote:
Originally Posted by Ilikemyscarf
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Here are some interesting astronomy facts:
"If the sun is reduced to the size of a ping-pong ball, Earth becomes a mote of dust eight feet from it, with a smaller speck, the moon, nestled beside it a quarter of an inch away. Jupiter is a pea 40 feet from the one-inch sun. A piece of dust 300 feet from the sun is Pluto, the smallest planet [this is an old book] in the solar system, the sun's family. Comets are atomic particles, invisible to a microscope, extending in a cloud up to several dozen miles from the sun. Although there are trillions of comets, the vast volume of space they occupy keeps them, on average several yards apart.
Alpha Centauri, the nearest star (a triple-star system), consists of two walnuts and a pea 400 miles away. Even if the universe were shrunk to this microscopic scale, it would be inconvenient to hike to the nearest star. If the model were encompassed in a volume of space the size of the Earth, the vast hollow globe would contain only 800 stars, represented by walnuts, cherries, oranges, and so on. The billions of other stars in the galaxy would range well outside the Earth-sized region..."
That was from 'The Universe and Beyond' by Terence Dickinson.