Jason E. Andersen

Bonus fun fact: Space, as the name implies, is fairly spread out. Consider that the earth is about 93 million miles away from the sun. For our human brains (at least mine anyway), this is hard to comprehend, so let’s make a model. If we were to make a scale model of the solar system, using a basketball to represent the sun, the earth would be about 1/10th of an inch in diameter and about 93 feet away. Pluto, the dejected former-planet, would be about 3,695 feet away from our sun-basketball. Alpha Centauri, our closest neighboring star system, is 4.367 light years away, or about 25 and a half trillion miles from the earth. On our model, Alpha Centauri would be about 4,300 miles away from our sun-basketball. Space is damn big!