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 kilometres
away and it takes fifteen thousand years
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
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if you ask how far away Earth orbits the
Sun most people give an answer like this
and it's kind of understandable it's
about right there because every picture
of the solar system ever looks like
these including my own report on the
solar system from the 4th grade
so this is the true scale of the solar
system starting with our size 5 soccer
ball son
which puts mercury at the 10-yard line
as a mere Fleck of pepper next is Venus
at the 19 yard line and it's about the
head of a pin next up is my favorite
planet Earth
orbited by our grain of salt moon
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
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and as the final rocket planet we have
Mars at the 40-yard line
also a pleco 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
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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 son
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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
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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 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 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
for Mars at about the 40 and then of
course the asteroid belt
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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 P which is Neptune 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 P that is planet 9 and while
of course you can't see it you'll just
have to take my word that directly in
front of us
seventeen 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
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from a different perspective this would
be your view if you park your spaceship
halfway to Planet nine it blows my mind
that relatively speaking our Sun 70 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-sized 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 20 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 will 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 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
representativeness image is the size of
Roosevelt's eye on a dime held at arm's
length to think about 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 sands take
a handful
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 a
tooth in Tessa Mele small chance
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that's just
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