Solar System Model From a Drone's View

(shaking can clicking) (lid popping off) (aerosol spraying) - Recently there was a bombshell announcement in the scientific community that there's a bunch of smaller objects in the outer solar system that appear to be influenced by the gravity of a massive hidden ninth planet. So this planet is 10 times more massive than Earth. It's a hundred billion kilometers away, and it takes 15,000 years to orbit the sun once.

So I've seen some pretty impressive videos about the scale of the solar system, but they're all still pretty abstract. Because they're either using renderings of the planets or they're using objects and distances that have no real world association. So I'm going to attempt to fix that today by representing the planets with just junk you could find lying around your house overlaid onto this football field.

So we'll start by reviewing the scale of the first eight planets, and then I will attempt to blow your mind by showing you exactly how far away the newly predicted ninth planet is. (bell dings) ♪ I'm so I'm so I'm so ♪ ♪ I'm so I'm so I'm so ♪ (aerosol can clicking and spraying) If you ask how far away Earth orbits the sun, most people give an answer. .

. - I don't know. .

. - [Mark] Like this. .

. - Right here, I guess. - [Mark] And it's kind of understandable.

About right there? - Okay Stop. - [Mark] Because every picture of the solar system ever looks like these, including my own report on the solar system from the fourth grade.

(buzzer buzzing) So this is the true scale of the solar system, starting with our size five soccer ball, sun, which puts Mercury at the 10 yard line as a mere fleck of pepper. (jazzy music) Next is Venus at the 19 yard line. (jazzy music continues) And it's about the head of a pin.

Next up is my favorite planet, Earth. (jazzy music continues) Orbited by our grain of salt, moon. (jazzy music continues) So if you retain nothing else from this video, just remember that Earth is the size of a head of a pin and it's at the 26 yard line.

(jazzy music continues) And as the final rocky planet we have Mars at the 40 yard line, also a fleck of pepper. And now we start to see bigger gaps. And more than a football field away from our sun, we have Jupiter which is the scaled size of a grape.

(jazzy music continues) And after a little bit of exercise, we come to Saturn which is a slightly smaller grape, and two and a half football fields away from our soccer ball sun. (jazzy music continues) Next up is the seventh planet, Uranus, which is the size of a pea. And its orbit is an average of five football fields away from our sun.

(jazzy music continues) And finally, we come to Neptune, which is also the size of a pea and orbits around our sun, the size of a soccer ball, nearly eight football fields away. Now this view should help you appreciate the difficulty in accurately representing both the size and distance between the planets in a single image. Okay, so before we get to the new ninth planet, let's recap.

(jazzy music continues) So we've got a pepper flake at the 10 yard line for Mercury. And then a pinhead at the 18 yard line for Venus. And then another pinhead for Earth at the 26 yard line.

And then a pepper flake from Mars at about the 40. And then of course the asteroid belt. And then we make it to Jupiter, which is a grape at about 135 yards.

Then we cross the street to get to Saturn, which is a grape that orbits at about two and a half football fields around our soccer ball sun. Then we double our distance from the sun to get to the seventh planet which is a pea at five football fields away. And finally, at nearly eight football fields away from our sun, we have another pea, which is Neptune.

(jazzy music continues) And now we've laid the framework for understanding just how far away Planet Nine is. Because to reach it, I would need to walk. And to walk some more.

And to keep walking at a brisk pace for five and a half hours before I finally reached the pea that is Planet Nine. And while of course you can't see it, you'll just have to take my word that directly in front of us, 17 and a half miles or 309 football fields away there's a yellow size five soccer ball sitting in an end zone. In fact, the width of that column you see represents the extent of our entire solar system as we know it today.

(jazzy music continues) From a different perspective, this would be your view if you parked your spaceship halfway to Planet Nine. It blows my mind that relatively speaking, our sun, 17 and a half miles away, would be able to keep this pea in orbit. But what's just as fascinating to me is when you consider that in our scale model, the sun is represented by a soccer ball, which anyone could easily fit inside a soccer ball.

And yet our massive star we call the sun, is pretty small when compared to some other stars. In fact, the largest star we know next to our soccer ball size sun would be as tall as the Empire State Building. So I want to close by telling you guys the craziest thing I learned about space while working at NASA for nine years.

Twenty years ago, astronomers did something pretty risky and decided to point the Hubble telescope at the darkest patch of the night sky for 10 days. Now, this was risky because time on the Hubble telescope was extremely limited, and there was a good chance the image would come back completely dark. So they started exposing the shot.

And for 10 days, photons entered the telescope and ended their journey of billions of years on Hubble's CCD detector. And at the end of 10 days, this was the resulting image. With the exception of these single stars, every speck, smudge, and spiral you see in this image is a galaxy with hundreds of billions of stars just like our own Milky Way.

And what truly makes this mind blowing is the portion of the sky represented in this image is the size of Roosevelt's eye on a dime held at arms length. To think about it another way, there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the playgrounds, beaches, ocean floors and deserts on our planet. So next time you're near some sand, take a handful.

And just imagine that one of those tiny grains is our sun with its orbiting planets. And then look at the hundreds of thousands of additional grains of sand in your hand each with their own orbiting planets. And then while holding that contemplate how many handfuls of sand exist on our planet.

So in my mind, regardless of how you think this whole universe came to be, there seems to be an infinitesimally small chance that we are alone.