Weekend reading: Where are we in the universe? by Clive Maxfield

Here are some interesting questions (and links to websites containing the answers) that may keep you busy for some time...

Before we start, you might find the Convert software utility I've provided at the end of this blog to be useful in answering some of the following questions (I keep this little rapscallion on my desktop, because I find it invaluable for a lot of things).

OK, here's the deal. Once a week I meet up with my Father-in-Law and a couple of other guys for lunch. As part of this we each take it in turns to provide some educational task for the others to ponder over the following week. The idea is that this information should be easy to research and locate using the resources of the Internet.

One of my recent offerings was based on the concept of "Where are we in the universe?" The idea was to provide an understandable sense of scale for various things like the size of the Earth versus the Sun and so forth. Anyway, I just thought that this might be of interest to a wider audience, so I decided to pen this blog. Maybe you would like research the answers to these questions for yourself and let me know how you get on (I'll provide a "worked solution" version sometime in the not-so-distant-future)

Let's start with "The Nine Planets Tour of the Solar System" (check out the website at www.nineplanets.org )

Question #1 What is the diameter of the Sun in both kilometers and miles (this is where the Convert tool will come in handy)?

Question #2 What is the diameter of the Earth in kilometers and miles?

Question #3 What's the average Earth-to-Sun orbit/distance in kilometers and miles?

Question #4 With regard to the following illustration, if we were to make a model of the Sun as a globe 300 millimeters (approximately 1 foot) in diameter: (a) What would be the diameter of a scale model of the Earth in millimeters and inches? (b) How far away would we have to place our model of the Earth to accurately represent the distance of its orbit in meters and feet?

Now, use This Paper to answer questions (5) and (6):

Question #5 When was Pluto discovered?

Question #6 How many planets are there in our solar system?

A useful place to go to answer questions (7) and (8) would be the www.nineplanets.org website:

Question #7 What's the average Earth-to-Pluto orbit/distance in kilometers and miles?

Question #8 If we were using the same scale model as described in question (4), how far would the model of Pluto

be from our model of the Sun in meters, feet, and American football fields (including the end zones)?

Our solar system is one of a huge collection of solar systems forming a group known as a Galaxy. This galaxy is called the Milky Way. From the side the Milky Way looks like two dinner plates that have been stuck together. From the top it looks like a spiral. The Milky Way page on the Wikipedia website may prove useful when it comes to answering questions (9) through (12) would be

Question #9 Approximately how many stars are thought to be in the Milky Way?

Question #10 What is a light year?

Question #11 What is the diameter of the Milky Way in light years?

Question #12 What is the thickness of the Milky Way at its center in light years?

Question #14 Generally speaking, where is our solar system located in the Milky Way? (You might want to use This Website to address this question.)

Question #15 Do you think our Sun is one of the larger suns or the smaller ones in our galaxy? Take a look at this website (www.rense.com/general72/size.htm) to get a feel for the relative size of the planets in our solar system and the relative size of our Sun to some other suns like Sirius, Pollux, Arcturus, Rigel, Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, and Antares.

Question #15 Last but not least, approximately how much bigger (in terms of its diameter) is Antares as compared to our Sun? (You might want to use This Article to answer this question.

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The Convert Utility: As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, there's a program called Convert that may prove useful for answering some of the questions above (I use it all of the time). This tool was created by a guy called Josh Madison who claims to have been: "Wasting time online since 1993!".

All you have to do is download this convert.zip file to your system, uncompress it, and run the ensuing convert.exe executable. The result will look something like the following:

You can use this tool to convert all sorts of things. If you select the Distance. tab, for example, and then select your input units (feet in this case) and your output units (inches in this case) and then enter a value in the Input field you'll see the converted result appear in the Output field.

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Questions? Comments? Feel free to email me – Clive "Max" Maxfield – at max@techbites.com). And, of course, if you haven't already done so, don't forget to Sign Up for our weekly Programmable Logic DesignLine Newsletter.
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