How Big Is The Solar System?

[JustNotCricket]

I have made a small model of the solar system 10cm across with the sun in the middle and Neptune furthest away. Now I want to put it in a box to show how far away the next stars will be.

How big should this box be?

[beso]

jomifl //I've been classifying gravitational lenses on zooniverse and I get to see a lot of galaxies, I think the size of the universe is beyond human comprehension. //

I contributed on their first project which classified spiral and elliptical galaxies. The stunning beauty of the images kept me clicking on another and another. I remember watching the traffic meter at my ISP and working until my allowance was up on the last nght of the billing period.

The sense of seeing something few or possibly nobody else had ever viewed was exciting.

I will never forget "Hanny's Voortwerp". A user from Holland found something of a type that had never been identified before and it became known by this term which means Hanny's Thing.

It was impossible not to be stuck by the sense of proportion driven by the realisation that I was focussed on an individual galaxy with billions of stars, yet in the background there were dozens more. Image after image with thousands of people viewing yet only a tiny proportion of the number of galaxies in the universe was in the survey.

[mushroom25]

douglas adams got it about right...
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

[beso]

Nah, Its bigger than that.

[beso]

If the Earth were the size of an atom the Universe would still be ten million kilometres across.

[JustNotCricket]

Thanks again everyone. I am closer to achieving what I set out to do. I have some sort of picture of how much space is there in the Space around us ie to the next star. The simple idea of us being in a box of nothing with just the solar system as our neighbours. I can just about make a scale model of our system on an old half-penny and put it into a very huge room to explain that the even then the room needs to be bigger. I have the half penny and I have the room with four basket ball courts. Now I just need to be able to drill some tiny little holes through the half penny. No, instead what I will do it print it out on the computer and use blobs of fabric pens or something to create our solar system.
I am looking forward to finding life on other planets. Because then we will not be able to visit them. It will be like having relatives that you don't want to stay with. Instead we will have to find a way to communicate with them. But that is beyond the remit of what I am trying to achieve. At the moment I am trying to explain this in English to German children aged 6 to 10. (I kid you not).

[mark25624]

Even you know who!
Has to give us some thing to think about and hopefully stay out of trouble!

[PhantomX]

Distance to nearest star is nearly 40x10^12 km. Your model represents Neptune's distance (46x10^6 km) as 5cm, so stars will be 50km or more away!
Space is BIG!