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When I was in high school, one of my science teachers took the class out to the football field and helped us create a model of the solar system scaled down to one hundred yards. That’s a lot like what artist Mishka Henner did, except that he used a twelve-volume book of five hundred six pages each. The width of each page represents one million kilometers. Earth is on p. 155 of the first volume, and Jupiter on p. 283 of the second. Each celestial body is to scale, as well, with the Sun filling two pages and Mercury just a speck.
I’m not entirely sure because the website is in Japanese, but it appears that a chocolatier called L’éclat offers chocolate versions of the planets of our solar system. Sadly, they’re not to scale, or else I’d call dibs on Jupiter!
Link (Google Translate) -via Nerdcore
Jeromina Juan of Paper, Plate, and Plane made cake pops that look like the planets of our solar system (minus Pluto, which shows which side she‘s on). The ring for Saturn was made with a candied disk shaped on parchment.
This clever Flash-based Solar System Scope website is probably the only time you can safely say "grab Uranus and wiggle it around" in polite company. Take a look and tell me isn’t that the geekiest bit of fun you’ve had in a while? Link – via metafilter
In the past few years, astronomers have detected many planets orbiting other stars. This led some to wonder what our solar system would look like to alien astronomers on the same quest, using similar technology. They concluded that the key to finding planets around our sun at a distance would be Neptune. This planet’s gravity has significant effects on the Kuiper Belt — the region of gas and dust surrounding the outer limits of our solar system. Christopher Stark of the Carnegie Institution for Science explained:
Through gravitational effects called resonances, Neptune wrangles nearby particles into preferred orbits. This is what creates the clear zone near the planet as well as dust enhancements that precede and follow it around the Sun.
“One thing we’ve learned is that, even in the present-day solar system, collisions play an important role in the Kuiper Belt’s structure,” Stark explained. That’s because collisions tend to destroy large particles before they can drift too far from where they’re made.
Link via Geekosystem
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Laura Cesari made a set of beaded necklaces that are patterned after the orbits of our solar system. Each one shows either the entire solar system or a planet and the orbits of its moons in proportionate distances:
Years ago, I discovered a particularly nice piece of agate in a friend’s bead shop that reminded me of Jupiter, and created a “Jupiter necklace” with other beads orbiting around it like moons. In the Solar System design, I decided to “zoom out” and focus on using small beads to measure the proportional distances between the planets. It took some calculations, a few abstractions, and a couple of prototypes: the first version was 75 inches long, made with 7-millimeter tubular glass bugle beads, each bead representing about 20 million miles. This Solar System Necklace design seemed like a good way to translate the mind-boggling distances of space into something tangible, something that people can measure physically with familiar objects.
This application will give you a lesson in how difficult it is to control the universe. Select how many planets you want and adjust their orbits and other parameters. Then set it in motion and watch your planets crash into each other or fly off into deep space. At least that’s what happened to mine! With some practice, you might get a real system going. Link -via J-Walk Blog
The above image is a selection and compression of an enormous interactive map of the almost two hundred manned and unmanned exploratory missions in our solar system over the past fifty years. It was created by graphic designers Sean McNaughton and Samuel Velasco for National Geographic. Click on the link and use the box in the upper-right corner of the screen to choose what area you’d like to see, and zoom as needed.
