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Showing posts from February, 2012

Is our solar system like an Oxygen atom?

If you've seen the film Men In Black, you might remember at the end of the movie that cool scene .  It starts with Will Smiths and zooms out over his car, above the streets, over Manhattan, Earth, past our Sun, solar system and beyond to reveal that the entire milky way galaxy is encapsulated in a marble.  Our whole universe is then in the hands of some octopus-like alien.  It's easy to see that we are not even a visible spec on the cosmic scale.  By way of comparison, we humans might be aliens to the sub-microscopic world of the molecules around us and in our body. So I wondered to myself is there's any comparison to the proportional size of the universe to that of the atomic world .  After browsing wolfram alpha , I found that there may be!  So here's an analogy... We have a massive sun and 8 planets in our solar system (poor  Pluto is a drawf planet ). Mass of Sun : 1.988×10 30  kg Mass of planets : 2.668×10 27  kg   Ratio of Sun / Planets = 745:1