Name: Milky Way
Uploaded: 2019-07-19
Duration: 3 min 47 s
Description: Milky Way is a huge collection of stars, dust and gas. It�s called a spiral galaxy because if you could view it from the top it would look like a spinning pinwheel. Let's watch.

Question

Consider the following questions.

Why is the Sun not drawn to scale in the picture above? Measure one planet and calculate how many times smaller it has been drawn. By applying the same scale factor, how big would the Sun have to be at that scale? How far away would it have to be?

Accepted Answer

Given the radius of the sun= $R_{s} = 695, 700 km$

The size of the sun shown = $4 mm$

The radius of Jupiter= $R_{j} = 69, 911 km$

The size of Jupiter shown = $9 mm$

The distance of Jupiter = $778.5 \times 10^{6} km$

Since the sun is much larger compared to the planets and far away from them, it is very difficult to show to the scale in a diagram . That is the reason that the sun's size and the distance from other planet is in shown to the scale .

The actual ratio of the radius of the sun to that of the Jupiter= $\frac{695700}{69911} = 9.95 say 10$

Therefore, the sun has to be of the size $10$ times of Jupiter 1.e $10 \times 90 = 900 mm$ , while it is shown only of $4 mm$ i.e it has to be scaled up by $250 times$

To the approximation for the size of Jupiter $1 mm = 6700 km$

On this scale, the distance of Jupiter from the sun ( $778.5 \times 10^{6} km$ ) should be represented by

$1.16 km$

William Heathcote Solutions for Chapter: Form, Exercise 4: Creating a scale model of the solar system

William Heathcote Physics Solutions for Exercise - William Heathcote Solutions for Chapter: Form, Exercise 4: Creating a scale model of the solar system

Questions from William Heathcote Solutions for Chapter: Form, Exercise 4: Creating a scale model of the solar system with Hints & Solutions

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