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Thread: How far away is Uranus?

  1. #1
    Admiral of Fugues Contratrombone64's Avatar
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    How far away is Uranus?

    This helped me basiclly get my head around the size of the solar system.

    If, then, we represent our earth as a little ball of one inch diameter, the sun would be a big globe nine feet across and 323 yards away, that is about a fifth of a mile, four or five minutes’ walking. The moon would be a small pea two feet and a half from the world. Between earth and sun there would be the two inner planets, Mercury and Venus, at distances of one hundred and twenty-five and two hundred and fifty yards from the sun. All round and about these bodies there would be emptiness until you came to Mars, a hundred and seventy-five feet beyond the earth; Jupiter nearly a mile away, a foot in diameter; Saturn, a little smaller, two miles off; Uranus four miles off and Neptune six miles off. Then nothingness and nothingness except for small particles and drifting scraps of attenuated vapour for thousands of miles. The nearest star to earth on this scale would be 40,000 miles away
    I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.
    —Albert Einstein.

  2. #2
    Admiral of Fugues Contratrombone64's Avatar
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    I note that Pluto isn't mentioned, not surprising as this was written in 1922, before Pluto's discovery. Also why Pluto isn't featured in the Planets by Holst.

  3. #3
    Admiral Honkenwheezenpooferspieler Corno Dolce's Avatar
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    Aloha CT64,

    *The Planets* was composed between 1914 and 1916. Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in February 1930. Pluto was declassified as a planet in August 2006 by a non-majority vote of the International Astronomers Union. It is now known as a planetesimal.

    Cheerio,

    CD
    Last edited by Corno Dolce; Sep-26-2008 at 17:44.

  4. #4
    Commodore con Forza
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    pluto is mickey's non-talking dog, and goofy is mickey's talking-dog-friend. solar system's pluto is a planetesimal and disney's pluto is a characteresimal. or maybe i will have to find another word that sounds better.

  5. #5
    Admiral Honkenwheezenpooferspieler Corno Dolce's Avatar
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    Aloha sunwaiter,

    Gosh, you make me laugh *Characteresimal* - Indeed.......

    Cheerio,

    CD

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