Using Household Objects to Describe the Size of Planets

You will need. There really wasnt a great scale model of the Solar System so I made a book.

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The outer planets include Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune.

. Label the planets so you dont forget which is which when you are cutting them out. Before 2006 Ceres was considered the largest of the asteroids with only about 13 of the mass of the Earths Moon. Without concurrent the Sun has become huge it has captured 9986 of the total mass of dust and gas from the original nebula.

Write the names of the eight planets on the board telling students they are in order from smallest to largest write. Spacecraft have flown by all of the planets except for Pluto and have encountered comets asteroids and all of the larger moons except Plutos moon Charon. UY Scuti vs Sun size comparison.

The bigger the planet the bigger the effect. The earth a green pea. Create a bar chart that orders these bodies from smallest to largest.

A stick some card scissors a ruler glue and a pair of compasses. We have included Pluto as further reference point for additional information. But small objects such as the Moon soon cooled off.

This means that Jupiter is actually more than 285 times larger in diameter than the smallest planet Mercury. But using some very small household objects and a lot of space on the floor or ground we can get a better sense of just how far apart the sun and planets are especially in comparison with. The inner planets are rocky and have diameters of less than 13000 kilometers.

Objects in the Solar System. The larger the potato the more slowly it cools. It becomes larger relative to the size of the planet it surrounds.

Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt Figure below. Free printable of my chart available below With the help of a circle template for the smallest planets a compass and a ruler I drew each planet for my kids to color in and cut out. Satellites have been placed in orbit around Venus Earth and Mars.

Below you will find a list of the planets mean diameters from largest to smallest. An objects weight is dependent on its mass and how strongly gravity pulls on it. Since the Sun is the best-known star for us solar radius and solar mass are two useful units of measurement to depict how big is a star.

The effect is similar to our own experience with a hot baked potato. The strength of gravity depends on how far away one object is from another. But unlike the asteroids Ceres has enough mass that its gravity causes it.

Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune. Planets are not perfect spheres. Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system at 139822 km in diameter.

The larger the planet or moon the longer it retains its internal heat and therefore the more we expect to see surface evidence of continuing geological activity. I worked out the rough scale for each planet using the information from a NASA chart on the relative size of planets to the sun and compared to Earth. Our solar system includes the sun and eight planets that orbit around the sun.

We can sort the eight planets from biggest to smallest from nearest to farthest from the sun and by how much they weigh. You can also arrange the planets in a straight line from the sun showing their relative distance to scale. A solar radius is approximately 690000 km 432000 miles and 1 solar mass is 2 x 10 30 kilograms 43 x 10 30 Solar radii.

However astronomers have observed that many solar systems with two three or more stars are numerous. You could also use a hula-hoop toy to form the main structure suspend the sun in the middle connect it to two sides and hang the planets around the circle. There are several ways that planetary diameters can be measured.

Cut your planets out. Eight objects in the Solar System qualify as planets. The most common is to measure the apparent angular diameter of the planet how big it looks against the sky very precisely using a telescope.

The smaller inner planets include Mercury Venus Earth and Mars. The largest non-planet objects in our solar system are our own Moon radius1738 km Io 1810 km Eris 1500 km Europa 1480 km Ganymede 2600 km Callisto 2360 km Makemake 800 kmTitan 2575 km Triton 1350 km Pluto 1200 km Haumea 950 km. All of these items were pretty close to scale 16 billion to 1 scale.

For tiny planets you might have to use an abbreviation. A hula hoop represented the sun. Jupiter was a softball and Saturn a tennis ball.

Its sometimes easier to compare planets using a measurement that isnt quite so complicated. Scale Planet Distance Scale Earth Diameter Actual Planet Distance Actual Earth Diameter Expand image. In science making small models of very large items is a helpful hands-on way to compare sizes.

This illustration shows the a lower bound for habitability in terms of a. In this activity various household items and food samples are used to represent the planets and illustrate their relative sizes. Combining this with a measure of its distance deduced from its orbit around the Sun reveals the planets actual size.

Planets are deformed this way because they spin and this experiment will show you how. Using the compass draw circles around the diameters. A book that took household items and created a Solar System model to scale.

In the example below the spreadsheet function calculates the product of the scale diameter of Earth B5 and the actual distance to Mars E6 divided by the actual diameter of Earth D5 using B5E6D5. Used and many different kinds of scientific instruments gather data about the objects in our solar system. Thats why the same object weighs different amounts on different planets.

Fit in the smaller planets Earth Mercury Venus and Mars around where you drew the bigger planets. Jupiter the largest planet in the system has captured 71 of the remainder. The size of Earth compared to other planets and stars.

The later means that there are no objects comparable in size in the vicinity of its orbit other than the planets moons. It is difficult to compare the sizes of the planets in our solar system directly since the solar system is so vast and the planets are so large. They bulge out at the equator and flatten at their poles.

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