Astronomy college course/Scale model of the solar system

Wikipedia has claimed that "if the Sun–Neptune distance is scaled to the length of a football pitch of about 100 metres, then the Sun is about 3 cm in diameter (roughly two-thirds the diameter of a golf ball) at one goal line with the gas giants all smaller than about 3 mm and Neptune found at the opposite goal line. Earth's diameter along with the other terrestrial planets would be smaller than a flea (0.3 mm) at this scale."

1. Is this true? Use an excel spreadsheet to verify this. The advantage of the spreadsheet is that if properly constructed, we can adjust the scaling and design our own scale model suitable for our own local environment.
2. Make a table of the diameters and orbital radii of all the planets (excluding Neptune). Include the Earth-Moon distance. Define a dimensionless scaling parameter that can be adjusted in order to make a custom designed scale model. This dimensionless number is the ratio of any distance divided by the corresponding distance on the miniaturized scale model. The meter is a convenient system of units for both astronomical and scaled lengths.
3. Use either local measurement or an internet program such as Google maps to find a distance that scales the actual Sun-Neptune distance to that of a local community such as the size of your town, campus, or building.
4. Construct the scale model. Simplest is to draw the objects on a piece of paper. You will need a strong magnifying glass and millimeter ruler to draw the terrestrial planets. Also easy is to find a ball to serve as the Sun and make the planets out of modeling clay. An alternative to actual construction is to design and estimate the construction costs of larger scale model for your local community. Then try to convince a person or organization to sponsor the construction of this model.

Copy and paste

There is no need to look up information and copy it into Excel. If you click the word you will see a list that can be copied and pasted directly into Excel.

The diameter of the Sun (km) has been reported as: 1392000^[1] and 1391400^[2]. The confusion being that it is a gas, and that the upper layer is so tenuous that it could be called a "hot vacuum" -- where it ends is a matter of choice.

2016 Spring Lake effort=

Goal: Set up scale model of solar system using Excel and this building. 10 Billion to one scale. How many AU is this building on that scale? We estimated the length of the building to be about 160 meters.

1 AU = 1.5E11 meters. Divide 1E10 (10 billion) to get 15 meters.

Links

• http://www.northern-stars.com/solar_system_distance_scal.htm
• http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html
• Back to Wright_State_University_Lake_Campus/2016-1/Phy1060/log#3.2F31_Thursday

1. ↑ http://www.space.com/17001-how-big-is-the-sun-size-of-the-sun.html
2. ↑ Wikipedia:Sun