To completely appreciate – or at least begin to comprehend – the astonishing range of worlds that make up our Solar System, it sometimes takes a Twitter animation.
Enter
James O'Donoghue, a planetary astronomer with the Japan Aerospace Exploration
Agency (JAXA). He shared a short video on Twitter that begins with the dwarf
planet Ceres and progresses through the Solar System by size (including Earth),
before zooming out to take in the Sun.
Even if
you know the relative sizes of everything in the Solar System, seeing Jupiter
and the Sun for the first time is awe-inspiring – and you may never have
understood how rapidly Jupiter rotates in relation to Earth.
Setting
aside some time to watch these spinning orbs is recommended. The video clip is
only 45 seconds long, but it's captivating enough that you'll want to watch it
multiple times — it's been viewed over 8 million times as of this writing.
The sizes,
tilts, and rotations in this clip are all accurate, yet the location has been
altered - all of the planets and stars you see have been brought closer together
to fit within the same video clip.
If you're
curious about the figures used in the animation, our planet is 12,742
kilometres (7,918 miles) across. Jupiter, on the other hand, has a diameter of
139,820 kilometres (86,880 miles), which is more than ten times larger.
The Sun's
diameter is around 1.39 million kilometres (863,706 miles), making it roughly
ten times the size of Jupiter and more than 100 times the size of Earth. To put
it another way, the Sun could hold around a million Earths.
James
O'Donoghue has a lot of experience with this – he's made a lot of other videos
that highlight the staggering enormity of the Solar System, and we're glad for
them.
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