Perhaps this finally answers that timeless question from Buckaroo Banzai, to wit:
“Why is there a watermelon there?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
No banana for scale?
Those bastards! What have they done with Pluto?
No Pluto 'cause they ran out of capers. Happens all the time.
This works much better than the earth as a peppercorn. But I don’t care about how many earths can fit inside the sun, I want to know how many Jupiters could fit inside the sun! If we scaled it so Jupiter were the peppercorn, then how huge a pumpkin would the sun be?
(and then if there were some kind of logarithmic scale where all the planets could still fit between the sun and earth, how far would the scale distance be to Alpha Centauri?)
I am… uncomfortable… with Uranus being compared to an apple.
Pfft… Everyone knows the earth is banana shaped.
This new learning amazes me, Sir Bedevere.
How would you define “fit inside”? Random sphere packing? Optimal sphere packing? Milling to powdered pepper and tamping it layer by layer? 
I dunno, ask the people who made the poster. Their alibi for not including the sun, I found unsatisfying.
How far would these fruit need to be apart to represent the average distances between the planets ? Just to put it all in perspective. Are we talking football pitch size or London footprint size?
It’s actually a really useful scale for simple visualization, giving nice round numbers in imperial measures.
Unless I missed my math somewhere ~1" diameter earth equates to a (roughly) 9’ diameter (3m) sun.
The distance from the Sun to the Earth is a neat ~1000’ (300m) or about a football field with endzones, and Jupiter is about 1 mile (1600m) from the Sun. The heliopause is approx 100 mile-radius bubble around the sun (depending on the direction you’re pointing).
(Sun to Neptune is about 5.5 miles about about 9 km.
Sun to Kuiper Belt is about 9 miles or just over 14km)
I guess the Solar System prefers imperial measures. 
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
