1. How big is big? How far is far?

2. What is a Million? 1,000,000 seconds is equal to 11 days, 13 hours, 46 minutes, and 40 seconds. What is a Billion? 1,000,000,000 (one Billion) seconds = 11, 500 days or 31.5 years!! One billion seconds ago, it was 1980.

3. Size of the Solar System If the Sun were a beach ball sitting on the goal line at Ravens Stadium…

4. Scale of the Solar System, cont… …the Earth would be a tiny round piece of pea gravel 93 yards away… representing 93 Million miles

5. …a little orange bead almost 400 feet away in the seats behind the goal post. (142 Million miles away) Mars would be….

6. Jupiter would be a baseball just over 1/4 mile away. (484M mi.)

7. Scale of the Solar System, cont…  Saturn would be tennis ball about 1/2 mile away. (888 Million miles)  Pluto, smaller than our moon, would be a pinhead almost 2 ½ miles away (3.67 billion miles) BTW – to drive out to Pluto at 60 mph, would take you 6975 years.

8. Size of the galaxy  The NEAREST star – Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light years distant - would be a slightly smaller beach ball, in Sydney, Australia 12440 miles away. Driving time - 47.6 Million years. If 1 year were 1 second long, it would still take you a year and a half to drive there

9. Size of the Universe  The nearest spiral Galaxy, the lovely Andromeda, is a mere 2 Million light years away. Like our galaxy, the Milky Way, Andromeda is approximately 100,000 light years in diameter and contains over 200 Billion stars. If the Milky Way were a hula hoop, Andromeda would be another hoop 80 feet away. If you were driving at 1 million miles an hour, it would take you 6 million years to drive across our galaxy and 120 million years to get to the outskirts of Andromeda.

10. Size of galaxies  The Milky Way is one of about 20 galaxies in our local cluster which, in turn is part of the local super cluster which contains thousands of galaxies. The farthest observed galaxy would be another hula hoop over 90 miles away. Driving at the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second, or 11 million times the speed limit, it would take you about 12 or 13 billion years.

11. Scale of the Universe http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/page/scale- universe-cary-michael-huang-california-high- school-15573968

12. You Do It… Sizing Up the Universe http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/idealabs/ universe/index.html

13. Scale in Peoria, IL  http://app.discoveryeducation.com/searc h?Ntt=scale+of+solar+system http://app.discoveryeducation.com/searc h?Ntt=scale+of+solar+system

14. Warm Up  Why can’t we make a scale model of the solar system and put it in my classroom?