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Worlds Largest Scale Model Solar System?
Richard_at_work writes "As the BBC is reporting, the UK is to attempt to create the worlds largest scale model of the solar system ever attempted. At a scale of 1:15million, this brings the distance between the Sun (positioned in Cheshire at the Jodrell Bank Telescope site) and the Earth to 15km or 10 miles, although you will need to travel the entire length of the UK to visit all of the planets. Interesting to note is the distinct lack of a 10th planet :) As well as the 9 planets and the sun, also shown on the model will be Halleys Comet and several asteroids. Would have been great if they had included probes such as Voyager 1." Maybe this claimant for world's largest solar system model will have to expand to keep up.
What is it supposed to do?
Just be there?
Looks like a attentionwhore stunt of some sort.
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
This is a fantastic idea for a realistic idea of how great the distances are from planet to planet, and from earth to the sun, but that is about the only thing I can see this being used for. I see this as an over-rated tourist attraction more than anything.
-- johntracy.com, because everybody else is wrong.
I just finished building a full scale model. I centered it on the sun instead of England though. It took a long time to position Sedna, which is why you're only recently seeing it in the news.
"The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance." -Thomas Jefferson
Best 3rd grade field trip ever!
Will they use slinkies to emulate a wormhole?
That would be the real one. ;)
Get some glasses, or maybe a hubble replica
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
All I can say is, I hope this isn't something other countries start getting into. First there's the competition to build the worlds largest skyscraper... now we can have a competition to build the world's largest scale model of the solar system!
silly boy, don't you know the universe is centered on England, it is where God lives after all.
Is going to cost them a small fortune to make.
Indefinitely Detained US Citizen
That's because Pluto is a Disney fabrication and doesn't really exist, it was all a big PR stunt to try to bring him up to Mickey's level.
*adjusts tinfoil hat*
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Did they take the curvature of the earth into account? I didn't think so.
This is not my sig
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." - Democritus
they have one along the smithsonian museums
it's the length of the mall, each one has a to scale model of the astral body, and a indicator how many feet to the left or right you must go to the next body.. it's very unreal to realize that if the eart were the size of 'this dot' then the sun is 5 blocks thattaway..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
If it's anything the US has west of the Rockies, it's large empty tracks of nothing but dirt and sand. I'm sure this project in the UK will be cool and all, but with all those trees and hills and cities getting the way, well, it just doesn't do much for me. Now if they set something like this up in the Great Basin Desert (190,000 sq mi) and you could actually stand at one planet and use high powered binoculars to see the next closet planet ...it'd probably give somebody a much better idea of how big the solar system really is.
ce n'est pas un Sig.
Looks like the old contender for biggest model is so big that they lost it track of it...
Dude, where's my packet?
15 * 15million km = 225 million km != the distance from Sun to earth
How about a scale model ofBritney Spears instead?
Indefinitely Detained US Citizen
I forgot who posted this, but I agree that Nox, the Roman god of night, would be a much more fitting name, as the position of god of the sea has already been taken by Neptune.
Would have been great if they had included probes such as Voyager 1.
A 1:15million scale model of the ~4m-wide Voyager 1 probe would measure ~250 nanometers.
Also the BBC says:
The scale of 1 to 15 million reduces the distance between the Earth and the Sun to about 16km (10 miles).
150,000,000 km / 15,000,000 = 10 km, not 16 km.
This reminded me of an article on /. detailing the construction of a scale model of the Solar System in Maine, USA. It was posted in an article from June of last year on /..
Here is the link
The Maine model is to scale, 1:93 million.
--"The perfect example of the man of action is the suicide." - William Carlos Williams
The Peoria Chapter of the Astronomical Soceity got a bunch of kids together via school groups and constructed the same thing in 1993. It stretched out all over the city of Peoria, IL.
From the site -- "Centered on the Sun at Lakeview Museum, the farthest planet, Pluto, is 40 miles away in Kewanee."
Saturn knocked out of orbit after 12 ton lorry crashed into it. Film at 11.
Hate me!
Planet 10? What 10th planet would this be? I know that recently a planetoid in our solar system (furthest known thing orbiting our sun) was found, but no "10th" planet.
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
I don't really understand what the point of this is, aside from bragging rights. Ideally, the whole point of having scale models is to convey to the viewer the dimensions of space involved. If you have an Earth globe and a Sun globe attached to a pair of strings in a dimly-lit room, you immediately know that perhaps our insignificant little planet isn't quite as large as we had believed.
But what happens when you visit the location of, say, the Jupiter location somewhere northeast of Paris? Its a completely isolated experience; you have nothing to compare it to. You know, intellectually, that Saturn is a couple hundred miles south, but that does absolutely nothing for you appreciation of the grandeur and sheer distance involved. The human mind can't comprehend on a conscious level the breadth of France unless they drive across it (and even then its more vestigial than anything).
~Tirinal
Hopefully they'll add road signs on the freeways
Pluto
400,000,000 miles
The sun's diameter is 1.4 Gm. A 15-millionth of that is 930 m. A bright white balloon of that size is going to be an architectural attraction on its own merit.
I wonder if they are going to include details like sunspots and coronal mass ejections.
There's an old legend about a Mapmaker, who was the finest mapmaker in his entire country. His maps were the most accurate, detailed, and well-documented maps available in the entire country; possibly the entire world.
One day, the King came to the Mapmaker, and requested a new map of the country, that would be more accurate than any map that had ever been made. And so, the Mapmaker made a map of the entire country that included every house, every road, and every lake. The map was so big, he had to store it in a barn.
The King was so delighted that he commissioned another map of the country, which was to be even more accurate. And so, the Mapmaker made a new map which was even more accurate, and included ever room and piece of furniture in the country, every foot path, and every well. The map was so big, he had to had to store the map in the fields behind the castle, and it had to be moved periodically so that the grass wouldn't die underneath.
The King was so thrilled with the new map, that he commissioned yet another map from the Mapmaker. It was to be the greatest map ever made. And so, the Mapmaker made another map, the best map ever made. The Mapmaker included every nail, every rock, every blade of grass, and every puddle in the entire country. When he was finished, he presented the map to the King, and there was a very big ceremony, for they had to unroll the map so the King could look at it. You see, the map was so detailed, that it was as big as the entire country! And when they unrolled the map, it blocked out the sun and stars in all the land.
Moral of the story: A map with a scale of 1:1 isn't of much use. Maps are usefull to the extent that they can compress information, are transportable, and are abstractions of reality.
The largest model solar system is in Sweden, with the Globe Arena acting as the sun.
Yes, but will the planets move?
Still a 93-meter ball would be impressive.
If you're going to ask for the 10th planet(oid), I assume you mean Sedna. But if you're going to include Sedna, you really shouldn't forget Quaoar. It's too small to be considered a planet, but so is Sedna.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
Caption on the bottom picture:
Distant Uranus will be sited in Bath
heehee, 2nd grade humor still gets me
01100010 01101001 01110100 01100101 00100000 01101101 01100101
So they included that stupid rock called Pluto, too? Luckily not that Sedna, next step would probably had been including every known asteroid that happens to be circulating sun.
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
Science discovery: Springs are spring-like, also some metal conducts electricity. Quick someone grab a patent! nrg
"If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!"
I will be visiting the UK again and will tie one on at the local pub (yet again) and be the FIRST MAN TO BE ARRESTED FOR PISSING IN PUBLIC ON MARS !
So where can I find it?
Seriously, who gives a fuck?
The world's current largest solar system model is located in Sweden, scale 1:20 million.
Not correct. I can make unlimited copies of DVDs without any access to codes - just as I can make copies of a text written in German without being able to read that language. Mass bootlegging of DVDs happens this way already.
CSS is all about controlling who gets to make DVD players. It does nothing to prevent copying. ezx
You can also boldly go where no man has gone before from the comfort of your own home and your chair, and the vicinity of your refridgerator and assorted beverages, with Celestia, a real-time 3D space simulator.
I do not moderate.
Will a raver party in NYC or some place like that be the nearest supernova or nebula? :P
I remember performance artist Chris Burden set up a huge piece called "scale model of the solar system" way back in the early 1980s. I saw a picture of a couple of the locations, I think the sun was down in Newport Beach, Mercury was installed at a Ferrari dealership in Beverly Hills, etc. Burden even went to the trouble of calcluating the REAL positions of the planets on the opening day of the exhibit, and positioning the planets on the earth in relation to position, not just distance. You would have needed to travel all across southern California to see all the "planet" sites. California is a lot bigger than England, I think these new guys haven't got a chance of beating the size of previous efforts.
Big fucking deal. When they build the 1:2 scale model, then i'll be impressed....and move off of this rock.
You can talk about whether Sedna should be called a planet or an asteroid for ever, but really it's just trivial. You could also ask why several other objects haven't been called planets, or why pluto has. The best answer you're ever likely to get is that changing things would be too much controversy to be bothered with, it would make lots of teaching material out of date, and it would start a slippery slope to make the names more ambiguous than they already are.
What's really interesting about Sedna is that nobody expected it to be there at all, and nobody yet has any well accepted theory about how it got there. It's further away than the expected range of the Kuiper belt, it's too close for the Oort cloud, and until now nearly everyone expected that to be mostly empty space... certainly nowhere that an object of Sedna's mass would be found. It also has a very eccentric orbit. Most astronomers out there are much more interested in this type of thing than trivial naming issues. It doesn't stop the media from trying to create a story out of nothing, however.
HEY!
You're standing on my 1:1 scale, realisticlly textured Earth map. Get off it before you mess it up dammit!
I don't even want to know what that makes Uranus....
(Hey, if it's good enought for MST3K, it's good enough for /.!)
This kind of thing could be used to create more resilient ribbon cables than we have now. If these things can tolerate repeated 180 degree bends and being pinch off at weird angles frequently over a long period of time, laptop designers may have finally met their new best friend! qfa
It was covered in Smithsonian Magazine last year. There's quite a bit of interview with the creator, Kevin McCartney.
I could swear that I read of another one out west(?) with the Sun represented as a planetarium dome.
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
I mean, c'mon, a real model would be 3d.
The Raven
...until I saw this.
"Planet Earth will be sited in Macclesfield. "
If the world was a person it's navel would be Macclesfield. Not a good place or a bad place, just strangely pointless and in need of a clean.
Now if they could just indicate the orbital paths too, they could have the ultimate crop circles. (http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/anasazi/connec t.html).
Trouble is, you'd need a large field! Maybe a field of snow--in Antarctica?
To include Sedna it would have to be 866.(6) km away from the sun. I don't think England could fit it in it's boarders, especially taking in account the curvature of the earth.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
You mean that there is no journalistic ingrity out there anymore? Hooray and thank you, Fox News! hory
I've used kde since the 1.0 days, upgrading all along on my dual ppro-200. Even in the slowest 2.0 days, it ran fast enough on my system. Sure I turned the eye-candy slider way down when I configured KDE the first time, but that is all. It works, and is fast enough.
The only time I have problems is when I hear the harddrive grinding away, swapping. Even then I'm running something heavy duty in addition to KDE, something that can take up most of my memory alone. fk
We visited Jodrell Bank last summer as I had fond memories from my youth.
The scope itself is impressive especially when moving around as they were continually doing when we were there.
However the exhibits in the visitor center are lame to the extreme.
Five quid just to park wasn't pleasant either. It's in the middle of nowhere for Christ sakes.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Cos by my calculations they'd have to demolish my house.
sig free since 1993
At a scale of 1:15,000,000 prove they didn't.
*** "It's only trivia until you need it." JMR ***
I made a scale model of the solar system for my kids in the field out the back. You need 600m of field. Here are the scales, shrinking by a factor of 1e11 (so 100km -> 1mm), giving diameter and distance from sun:
-
Sun (Sol) 140 mm -
-
Mercury: 0.5 mm 6m
-
Venus: 1.2 mm 10m
-
Earth: 1.3 mm 15m
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(Moon: 0.3 mm 0.04m from Earth)
-
Mars: 0.7 mm 23m
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Jupiter: 14.3 mm 78m
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Saturn: 12.1 mm 142m
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Uranus: 5.1 mm 287m
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Neptune: 5.0 mm 450m
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Pluto: 0.2 mm 591m
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AlphaC-A: 167 mm 4,200 km
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Sirius: 249 mm 8,600 km
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Betelgeuse: 37 m 427,200 km
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Milky Way: 100,000,000 km
(Sorry about the crap formatting - I couldn't get this through theAnd it's fantastic!! You make the planets out of blu-tac or dough. It's great making the tiny ones - you're making a sphere 0.2mm across! - you roll out a thin hair of material and cut it with a knife. Jupiter's about the width of my thumb. You put little rings on the ringed planets. And you use a balloon for the Sun. Then you pace out the positions, and place them on the path, with a little marker so you can see where they are. Combine this with a good play with Celestia, and you're talking about some pretty scarily educational stuff. Celestia's fantastic, but the exponential speed control (though totally necessary) means that you can't get a perspective on size and distance.
Then you reveal (from UK) that the nearest star is in New York! (actually, that's a bit far, Cairo is a better match), and Sirius (which they know) is in San Francisco...
And look at Betelgeuse! - it's HUGE! - twice the size of our house - and it's about where the moon is. And the Milky Way ... well, it all gets abstract again. But it's interesting to stand at Pluto, look towards the Sun, close your eyes a bit, and imagine that you're on the edge of an empty ball with the Sun at the centre. And then turn around, and there's nothing else before America... just emptiness....
Pretty good.
And what's weird is that so few people have any sense of scale here - my wife figured that Alpha Centauri would be in a town a few km away.
I guess that this big model they're making is a PR stunt - it raises awareness, and gets people to play with things like Celestia. After all, they seem to be trying to create a memorable impression and a sense of distributed ownership ("We own Jupiter") rather than actually draw the big picture.
Did anybody notice that if the 1:15 million scale quoted in the Slashdot article is correct that 10 scale miles is 150 million miles? The average distance from the Earth to the Sun is roughly 93 million miles, so 150 million is a about 50% too high. Which is wrong, the scale provided or the scale distance quoted?
I would have thought God would have had a lower slashdot ID# than that.
Is that why the Brits want to keep Gibraltar?
It's all fun and games until someone makes a 2:1 scale model.
Goals for 2011: 1. Stop plate tectonics. 2. Prevent animal predation. 3. End supernovae now. 4. Rid the world of evil.
Darl & co are drawing up plans for their next lawsuit. The earth model will be infringing on SCO IP, possibly including but not limited to building and or landscaping plans. The infringing particulars can not be revealed at this time, due to trade secret considerations.
A source claiming inside knowledge of SCO legal strategy reports that Darl McBride's head, or the likeness thereof, will be cited as company "Intellectual" Property, and that any model of the earth at the planned scale will have to contain a representation of the aforementioned property. We find reason to question the reliability of this source, as clearly the distance which said object is positioned up the owner's arse falls well outside the boundaries of the planned model.
I like the diagnonal idea, and Florida is The Sunshine State. Start with a dome in Miami for the sun, end with the ping pong ball in Fairbanks.
National Geographic Traveler just started a series of articles from a guy driving that distance, heading south. He could have visited the various planets along the way.
"Sweden Solar System" is 1:20 million in scale, with the sun represented as the Globe Arena in Stockholm. The Globe Arena is 110 meter in diameter, but was not built for this purpose, of course.
http://www.astro.su.se/swesolsyst/moreinfo.html
Lost: one sig, witty, 120 chars, sentimental value. Reward offered.
its just dumb. thats all.
I wonder how long it will be unitl the largest solar system model is largest then the solar system it self.
I can see my house from here!! Oh wait... Im actually in my house... Right besides Venus. ....
turtles have flippers/live in sea tortoises have feet/eat lettuce/move slowly.
Bill Nye the Science Guy did something like that. I don't know how large UK is (in driving hours), but Bill Nye made a model that put pluton about 8 hours away, presumably at 60 miles an hour.
Will it update itself in realtime?
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
"I have a map of the United States...actual size. It says, "Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile."
"Last summer I folded it.
"I also have a full-size map of the world. I hardly ever unroll it..."
- Steven Wright
I hear that Bremer in Iraq has need of agents to make random public accusations for the US. It seems that the real trouble makers are wearing turbans made of Linen, which sounds close enough to Linux to be an illegal derivation of SCO IP. Darl is welcome to take his bodyguards with him.
I'm afraid your scale is off by about a factor of 10, although your assertion that 100km -> 1mm is off by a factor of 100 in the other direction (perhaps you meant 1 micron?). Note that one AU is about 1.5x10^11 meters, so when rescaling by 10^11, Earth should be 1.5 meters from the sun, which should be 13.9mm in diameter. Also note that one light year is about 10^16 meters, so the distance to Alpha Centauri should be 411 km (as opposed to 4200), and the diameter of the Milky Way should be about 10^7 km.
Naturally, your table is essentially correct if instead you are shrinking by a factor of 1e10. This means 10,000 km -> 1mm.
"Your notation sucks!" -- Serge Lang (1927-2005)
Dad? Is that you?
I'm in Minnesota, and over here from the UK is close enough to the right distance. More importantly, the weather is the same as what Voyager 1 has. Lots of dark and cold, as contrasted to the nice cosmic dust fog around the UK solar system.
The Sweden Solar System is the world's largest model of our planetary system, at a scale of 1:20 million. The Sun is represented by the Globe arena in Stockholm, the largest spherical building in the world. The planets are placed and sized according to scale with the inner planets being in Stockholm and Jupiter (diameter 7.3 m) at the International airport Arlanda. The outer planets follow in the same direction with Saturn in Uppsala and Pluto in Delsbo, 300 km from the Globe. At each planet station, exhibits provide information about astronomy and the natural sciences, and also about related mythology and culture.
GEORGE!!
I would have thought God would have had a lower slashdot ID# than that.
Nah, it took him 7 days before he had time to sign up.
http://www.umpi.maine.edu/info/nmms/solar/
This is a 40 mile long model. They say they are 1:93,000,000
.. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. -- Paul Graham
The whole point of these solar system models is to give a sense of the vast space between the planets. If you make it too big, it becomes more and more difficult to get this sense. People can't relate to 100's or 1000's of miles very well.
Ah, Douglas Adams. He left us too soon.
-Peter