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Astronomy: Akash Magoon

This document discusses the scale of objects in the cosmos and how difficult it is for humans to comprehend. It provides comparisons to help illustrate the vast sizes and distances involved. The circumference of Earth is around 40,000 km, while the sun's circumference is around 100 times greater at 4,379,000 km. The distance from Earth to the Sun is around 90 million miles, which would take a plane traveling 500 km/hr around 80 hours to circle Earth but over 8000 hours to circle the Sun. Distances within our solar system are also often misunderstood due to misleading depictions.

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Akash Magoon
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86 views5 pages

Astronomy: Akash Magoon

This document discusses the scale of objects in the cosmos and how difficult it is for humans to comprehend. It provides comparisons to help illustrate the vast sizes and distances involved. The circumference of Earth is around 40,000 km, while the sun's circumference is around 100 times greater at 4,379,000 km. The distance from Earth to the Sun is around 90 million miles, which would take a plane traveling 500 km/hr around 80 hours to circle Earth but over 8000 hours to circle the Sun. Distances within our solar system are also often misunderstood due to misleading depictions.

Uploaded by

Akash Magoon
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Akash Magoon

Explaining Cosmology with Numbers:

Scaling Earth With the Universe

Astronomy

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Akash Magoon

A Brief Overview

Cosmology is a fascinating branch of Astronomy. Cosmology is one of the most

mistaken components of Astronomy. Most people find it rather arduous to analyze the scale of

the solar system. Since there is such a vast amount of space in our solar system, it is laborious

to envision the size of celestial body in the solar system, not to mention other Galaxies. Because

this erroneous branch of Astronomy is so enthralling, I thought it would be interesting to

research it.

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Akash Magoon

Scale of Earth and Sun

It is relatively difficult for most people to understand how big the sun is compared to earth, or

even how far they are apart from each other. The circumference of planet Earth is 40,000

kilometers. An average commercial plane travels roughly 500 km/hr. As fast as this sounds, in

comparison to the sun, or anything thing in space, this is very slow. At 500 km/hr a commercial

plane would take about 80 hours to travel the circumference of the earth. Though that may be

a long time, but let’s compare it to the sun. The circumference of the sun is 4,379,000

kilometers, which is close to 100 times the circumference of the earth. If the airplane takes 80

to travel around the earth circumference, and the sun’s circumference is 100 times the

circumference of the earth, it would take 8000 hours to travel the sun.

The distance from Earth to the Sun during perihelion is 90,000,000 miles, 149,000,000

kilometers, and/or 1 AU. Analyzing these numbers can be very difficult because most humans

aren’t very well acquainted will large numbers when it comes to distance. People often travel to

Florida by plane, which is 1000 miles away. Traveling to Florida 90,000 would be equivalent to

traveling to the Sun, one way.

http://library.thinkquest.org/29033/b
egin/earthsunmoon.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth

http://www-pds.jpl.nasa.gov/planets/

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Akash Magoon

Scale of Our Solar System

Though Mercury is displayed by many Solar System depictions to be very close to the sun,
indeed it is not. Because depictions are so misleading, people are often unaware of the
distance planets are apart from each other. For example, Mercury may be depicted to show
that it is 2 Kilometers from the Sun; it is actually an unpredicted 46 million kilometers. It would
take a plane 17 years to travel to the Sun; 100 years to travel from Earth to Jupiter, and 200
years from Jupiter to Saturn.

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Akash Magoon

Scale of Stars

The Sun's diameter is 864,938 miles (1,391,980 km), which is 10 times the size of

Jupiter and 109 times the size of Earth. The volume of the Sun is 1,299,400 times greater than

the volume of the Earth, and about 1,300,000 Earths could fit inside the Sun. There is so much

space even within galaxies that normal distance measurements are useless Scientist express

measurement in space by light years. Light travels at a speed of about 186,000 miles per

second. In other words, light can travel 7.5 times around the entire earth in just one second. In a

year's time, light can travel six trillion miles. It takes over four years for the light from the nearest

star to reach the Earth.

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