How big is our solar system? Will we ever be able to cross it?
Space is big, really really big! Planets are big, Stars are massive and the distance between
them is almost impossible for the human mind to imagine. Have you ever wondered how big our
Solar system is? This question might seem very simple to answer and the answer is just one
google search away. But have you ever tried to imagine the scale of our solar system? How big
can our solar system be? Will humanity ever be able to go outside the solar system? In
this video we will take you on a journey to explore our solar system
and how big it really is and whether or not we will be able to cross it!
There’s more to our cosmic neighborhood than just the sun and the eight planets, it also
has dozens of moons and millions of asteroids and comets residing in the farthest part of our solar
system. Our solar system is truly vast. Even though the planets are close together compared
to the distances between stars, there is still a lot of empty space out there. It would take
months to travel from one planet to another, even at the speed of light. And Voyager 1,
the most distant human-made object, has been in space for more than 40 years and it still has not
escaped the influence of our Sun. As of Feb. 1, 2020, Voyager 1 is about 13.8 billion miles (22.2
billion kilometers) from the Sun — nearly four times the average distance from the Sun to icy
Pluto. That just goes to show how big our solar system really is. Who knows what lies beyond it?
Our solar system is so big it is almost impossible to imagine its size if you use
ordinary units like feet or miles. The distance from Earth to the Sun is 149 million kilometers,
but the distance to the farthest planet Neptune is nearly 4.5 billion kilometers. Compare this to
the farthest distance you can walk in one full day (110 kilometers) or that the International Space
Station travels in 24 hours (640000 kilometers). The best way to appreciate the size of our solar
system is by creating a scaled model of it that shows how far from the sun the eight planets are
located. Astronomers use the distance between Earth and sun, which is 149 million kilometers,
as a new unit of measure called the Astronomical Unit. It is defined to be exactly 1.00 for the
Earth-Sun orbit distance, and we call it an AU. Therefore, Neptune’s distance from the
Sun in AUs is 30.1 AU, which is much easier to conceptualize than 4.5 billion kilometers!
If we scale down the solar system to the size of a football field, the sun is only a ball about
two-thirds of an inch in diameter. The inner planets, including Earth, would be dwarfed by
a flea, which is about 3 mm long. The vast distances between us and the objects in our
solar system can be daunting, but by shrinking everything down to a more relatable size,
we can gain a new perspective on just how big (or small) our place in the universe really is.
Traveling at the speed of light, which is 300,000 km/sec (670 million miles per hour! ), is the
quickest method to move from one location to another in our solar system. Only radio waves
and other kinds of electromagnetic energy can move at this speed. When NASA sends spacecraft
to visit planets, scientists and engineers must maintain radio communication with the
spacecraft in order to collect scientific data. However, since the solar system is so huge,
radio transmissions from Earth take a long time to go out and return.
So, To get a perspective on how much time it would require for us to travel to different areas of our
solar system, let’s sit in a spaceship and start our journey from our host star, SUN. Astronomers
measure these distances in astronomical units (AU), which are the average distance between
Earth and the Sun over the course of a year. One AU is about 150 million kilometers. We will have
passed the orbits of all the inner, rocky planets within a quarter-hour after leaving the Sun:
Mercury (0.43 AU) after 3 minutes, Venus (0.7 AU) after 6 minutes, Earth (1 AU) after 8 minutes, and
Mars (1.5 AU) after 13 minutes. Another 15 minutes will take us into the Asteroid Belt, which is home
to the dwarf planet Ceres (2.8 AU), whose orbit we will transit in 23 minutes. To reach Jupiter's
orbit (5.2 AU) in 43 minutes, we must travel almost the same distance. With progressively
enormous distances between planets, traversing the region of the gas giants takes about 3.5
hours. Neptune's orbit (30.1 AU) is 4 hours and 10 minutes into our voyage. We enter the Kuiper
Belt at 5.5 hours from the Sun and stay there for one hour and ten minutes. Around 12 hours into our
adventure, we begin to escape from the heliosphere into interstellar space. However, crossing beyond
the Oort Cloud may take us up to a year. This is all if we travel at the speed of light!
But how much time would it take us if we cover the same journey with Earth as the starting point and
with the fastest spacecraft humanity has right now? Based upon our current technology, we need
at least 7 months to reach mars, but it can take considerably longer if our cycles aren't aligned.
Now we know, We'll never go to Jupiter since it's primarily formed of gas. We may, however,
travel to Europa, one of its moons. The journey to Jupiter will take around 6 years,
and we did it the hard way back in 1990, utilizing Earth's gravity to propel the Galileo probe twice.
Next if we wanna take a journey to Saturn, we would need at least 7 years to complete
it. We will need 9 years to travel to Uranus, 12 years to travel to Neptune and 9.5 years to
reach Pluto. What about beyond Pluto? After Pluto the distances get a little crazy. Chaos reigns
50,000 AU from Earth. At this icy distance, in the cold recesses of our solar system,
we find the Oort cloud. At just over 4.6 trillion miles (7.4 trillion km) from the solar surface,
the dense cloud is the hypothesized region at the outer edge of the Sun’s influence.
This portion of our neighborhood is nearly a quarter of the distance to Proxima Centauri,
the nearest star to the Sun (which gives you some idea of just how far the Sun’s influence extends).
Some scientists believe that you could travel halfway to Proxima Centauri before you truly
leave the Sun’s sphere of influence (meaning that you would have to essentially travel to the next
star in order to leave our solar system). Given that Proxima Centauri is 4.24 light years away,
that means that the Sun’s influence extends at least 2.12 light years from Earth – or nearly
13 trillion miles. That’s just mind-bogglingly huge. If we ever want to cross our solar system
it would take us a staggering 30,000 years just to leave the influence of our sun,
using our current technology. That is just a very large amount of time for a human being
and not a very interesting journey too! That’s not it, if you are thinking about
how much time we would need to reach proxima centauri, the answer won’t make you happy!
Our Solar system is over four light years away from the nearest star system, Proxima Centauri.
In other words, it would take four years for light to travel from Proxima Centauri to our
Solar system- but that's only if we could travel at the speed of light. Unfortunately,
current methods of interstellar travel would take much longer than that. The fastest man-made
object is the Parker Solar Probe, which can reach speeds of up to 430 kilometers per second. But
even if we could build a spacecraft that could travel at that speed, it would still take over
70,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri.
The vast distances between the stars provide some perspective on the technological difficulty
of astronomy. Because the main star in the Alpha Centauri system is nearly the same
size and brightness as our Sun, seeing it in the night sky is like to being in Washington,
D.C. and seeing an extremely brilliant grapefruit in San Francisco (neglecting
the problems introduced by the curvature of Earth). The fact that we can see the star at
all is surprising, yet the darkness of the night sky permits the human eye to detect
it as a faint dot of light. Through large telescopes, it seems considerably brighter,
but we still cannot discern surface details of the star. The immense distances between the
stars are also a grim lesson in interplanetary travel. Although science fiction films such as
Star Trek and Star Wars make such travel appear to be simple, the reality is somewhat different.
The spaceship Voyager 2 was launched in 1977 and traveled by Jupiter in 1979, Saturn in 1981,
Uranus in 1986, and Neptune in 1989. It is presently hurtling towards the stars at over
50,000 kilometers per hour—roughly 100 times the speed of a bullet. Even at this speed, it would
take Voyager 2 nearly 100,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri if it were heading in that direction
(which it isn't). Convenient interstellar travel is still well beyond our current technology.
So how can we shorten the journey? Or is it just impossible and pointless for us to dream about
going to the stars? Scientists are working on developing new propulsion systems that could
potentially get us to Proxima Centauri within a human lifetime. One such system is Solar sails,
which use the pressure of sunlight to push a spacecraft forward. Another
is Breakthrough Starshot, which proposes using a powerful laser to accelerate a nanocraft to
high speeds. With any luck, we may one day be able to visit our nearest stellar neighbor.
Lightspeed spacecraft are still the stuff of science fiction, making it exceedingly
difficult for astronomers to study the Solar System's outskirts. Objects circling the Sun
now reflect relatively little of its light and are difficult to observe even with the largest
telescopes. Traveling at physically possible speeds, robotic spacecraft take several years to
reach the outer Solar System. However, remarkable progress is being made. The twin Voyager probes,
which were launched in 1977 to explore the huge planets, are still sending back data as
they travel further into space. The current rate of technological advancements gives us a hope
to venture out among the stars. So what do you think about the size of our solar system? Will
we ever cross our solar system? Let us know what you think in the comment section below,
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