Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps
by Kees Boeke
(1957)
page 20
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15. In this drawing the whole solar system, that is, the sun with all the smaller bodies which move around it, has been reduced to the space of a circle a little over I centimeter in diameter. Apart from the planets and Halley's Comet, which were shown in #13 and #14, there are a number of very small bodies, which we leave out because they are too small to be seen from such distances. These pictures really give a wrong impression of what the solar system would look like, for all the orbits are shown. What would be seen would be only the sun as a small star (it would at this distance seem only about 100 times as bright as Venus looks from the earth) and near it the planets, which themselves give no light but are merely lit up by the sun on the sides turned toward it. Light takes nearly 11 hours to travel across the solar system.

1 cm. in picture = 1015 cm. = 10,000,000,000 km. Scale = 1:1015


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This content is from Kees Boeke's book, Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps. It has been placed online without permission.
Copyright (C) 1957 by Kees Boeke. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted, or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photo-copying and recording, or in any information storage and retrieval system, without permission.