This very cool image shows you all the objects in the solar system bigger than 200 miles in diameter. Well, it doesn’t include the solar corona, or Jupiter’s magnetosphere, but it does include planets, asteroids, moons, and one star. Very nifty. And yeah, this has been around a while, but I’m sitting in my empty house (the furniture has all been moved out and is on its way to Colorado), I was up late last night packing, up early this morning finishing packing, and we just got back from the Little Astronomer performing in her school play ("Mary Poppins", for those taking notes, and she was great). So, my point is: I’m tired, and went through my old blog entry drafts looking for something easy. 
Tip o’ the lens cap to ToSeek.
Everything bigger than 200 miles
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:36 pm
Nice - but now I have to get another 3 or 4 monitors to use it as a desktop wallpaper, or I’d have to cut through Callisto
May 24th, 2007 at 1:33 am
I had no idea how many relatively large TNOs there were.
May 24th, 2007 at 2:58 am
That’s a pretty neat image! Makes me feel very tiny, ehe.
May 24th, 2007 at 3:39 am
Phil, I saw this image someplace else not too long ago and saved it to my astro image folder. Its really well done. It reminds me of something my observing partner and I did last year. We were supporting a local conservation center by doing night programs, setting up our scopes for local groups touring the center. I enlisted the help of an electronics wiz at work and we made a solar system model that consisted of little colored lights spaced proportionately along a wire. If I remember correctly, our scale was 1AU = 1Ft. At that scale, Pluto, which we still consider a planet, was over 100Ft away. I was astonished myself at the vast distance between our planets but what was more impressive was that we figured at the same scale, the closest star would be in Moab, Utah! We’re in Denver. Most of the people who came out to visit were boy scout and girl scout troops. They really had fun walking down the wire in the dark looking at the little LEDs with cards hanging next to them. Each card had a picture of that planet with a bunch of simple facts about it like, distance from the Sun, number of moons, diameter of the planet, etc. One thing we found out right away; those kids knew more than their parents about our solar system. They never ceased to impress me.
May 24th, 2007 at 4:22 am
Very cool! Need Jumbovision to really get the whole thing.
Good artwork was done for Pluto, Eris, Charon, and others. I suppose not much is known about the other small objects, the ones that look like billard balls.
May 24th, 2007 at 4:54 am
Thanks for the image.
Best wishes for the house move. Now you take care of your family and don’t worry about getting back to us. We’ll be just fine.
May 24th, 2007 at 5:56 am
You packed your house yourself! Get packers in to do it. Had to have packers since the wife had to go into hospital 3 days before we had to move. Never going to pack my stuff again.
May 24th, 2007 at 6:32 am
Cool pics! Now if I just had a really BIG printer,,,
Oh well, saved it to the computer.
Get back to us when life settles and the dust clears. We’ll be continuing our arguments, er, I mean, discussions, while you’re away.
Live long and perspire,
GAry 7
May 24th, 2007 at 7:27 am
Where’s Rosie O’Donnell?
(rimshot)
Or Simon Cowell’s ego?
(rimshot)
Yeah, yeah… cheap shots. That’s a Thursday for you. Never could get the hang of them.
Actually, Cowell’s ego would encapsulate the whole image.
(rimshot)
Oh, I’ll be here all week, folks!
May 24th, 2007 at 9:07 am
What I’m waiting for is a chart of every object on orbit with the Sun less than one picometer in size.
May 24th, 2007 at 9:12 am
What?? they left off Planet X !!!
May 24th, 2007 at 9:38 am
>>> What I’m waiting for is a chart of every object on
>>> orbit with the Sun less than one picometer in size.
Pfft! Lightweight!
Take it down to the Planck length, baby!
May 24th, 2007 at 9:47 am
To be fair, this should be everything known bigger than 200 miles… I guarantee you that there are more undiscovered TNOs that are big enough to make the cut.
Awesomely cool, though. And to hell with Pluto; where’s the lobby for Ganymede and Titan to be planets???
May 24th, 2007 at 10:57 am
I wonder if Hyperion could be used as a propellant/fuel depot for a crewed mission to Titan. The moon’s orbit is close to that of Titan as it has a 3:4 orbital resonance with the giant moon and would require relatively little energy to transfer from one moon to the other. Hyperion is composed mostly of water-ice, which can be broken into hydrogen fuel and oxygen for landers via nuclear reactor. Water could also be used as a propellant for nuclear based propulsion schemes.
May 24th, 2007 at 11:06 am
is it just me, or does the 3rd from the far right, Mimas, look like a death star? i suppose it IS the size of a small moon.
May 24th, 2007 at 11:27 am
No, you’re not imagining it, Chris. Mimas is the Death Star! I know I’ve seen a write-up on it somewhere, might well have been here.
Oh, I am so embarassed! I never knew that Uranus and Neptune were gas giants! I had always assumed that they were rocky planets about Earth-sized, and that Saturn and Jupiter were the only gas giants in our system.
Here these planets were, right in my back yard, and I didn’t even know what size they were. Blush…
May 24th, 2007 at 11:50 am
I plan on printing it out for my daughter when she’s a little bit older.
BTW, off topic but tomorrow (May 25th) is Towel Day! http://www.towelday.kojv.net/
BA, with all the packing, do YOU know where your towel is?
May 24th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
BA, with all the packing, do YOU know where your towel is?
I’m sure he does, we all know BA is a hoopy frood.
J/P=?
(my light green face flannel is right with my pants, so there’s a 50-75% chance I will remember
my pants, that is)
J/P=?
May 24th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Congrats on your move to Colorado, it is great here.
May 24th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
I am struck by how close in diameter Mercury and Mars are. Given Mercury’s higher density, they’d have similar gravity, right?
CJSF
May 24th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
Um, cool image, but it says “Four dwarf planets” and I only counted three: Eris, Pluto, and Ceres. Charon is listed as Pluto’s moon; I thought since the barycenter was outside Pluto they were both dwarf planets? Is that the fourth?
May 24th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
I suggest you have a look at this model of the solar system :
http://www.troybrophy.com/projects/solarsystem/
But you must be 1. patient, 2. a sturdy mouse, or 3. have a very large monitor !
May 24th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
Shane, it says Three dwarf planets. Don’t overthink something simply misread.
May 24th, 2007 at 8:19 pm
It’s amazing how many moons would qualify as planets, if only their primary were the sun, instead of whichever planet they orbit. What got me about their size was just how huge some of those moons are, and how small others are. (Man, I’d never realized how TINY Enceladus is. It sure looks big on those images at CICLOPS!)
Sure, I’d read their diameters on several websites & books, but it never really ‘clicked’ for me. Seeing them all lined up in scale really drives the point home.
May 25th, 2007 at 7:28 am
Oh, I am so embarassed! I never knew that Uranus and Neptune were gas giants! I had always assumed that they were rocky planets about Earth-sized, and that Saturn and Jupiter were the only gas giants in our system.
Ah, but they are approximately the same *mass* as the Earth, so some confusion can be blamed on that similarity.
May 25th, 2007 at 11:19 am
Oops! Thanks, Quarky. I still think Charon should be a dwarf planet, though… :p
May 25th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
“Ah, but they are approximately the same *mass* as the Earth, so some confusion can be blamed on that similarity.”
Uh- no they aren’t. Uranus is more massive than Earth by a factor of almost 15, and Neptune by a factor of over 17. I wouldn’t call that approximately the same.
May 25th, 2007 at 4:55 pm
I weigh 300 pounds and my wife tells me I am as big a round as a planet? Does that count?
May 26th, 2007 at 3:52 am
Interesting that although Uranus is 15 times earths mass, surface gravity is only .886 G. I’d only weigh 203 lbs there,,,
Neptune at 17 earh masses has a surface gravity of about 1.15 G. Density plays a big role in surface gravity.
Earth is a rocky planet with a very thin gaseous envelope. The gas giants are(more or less) the other way round,,,
GAry 7
May 26th, 2007 at 10:34 am
Couldn’t help but notice that there is a certain few discontinuities in the size progression in the image, (which is absolutely a very telling piece of comparison if ever I saw anything).
Check out the size jump between Neptune and Earth; Venus and Mars; Callisto and Io; Europa and Triton; Pluto and 2005 FY9; 2002 TC302 and Ceres; 1995 SM55 and 2002 AW197. There seems to be a consistant size in each of the various “sections”, and a definite jump to the next section. With a large (enough ?) sample of Solar System bodies, I would have thought there would be a more even graduation in sizes. Are there some otherwise un-discovered bodies?
It has been postulated that various minor planets, even dwarf planets and large asteroids, are captured bodies from other areas of the Solar System, and I guess the jury is still out on most of them. But I does seem odd to me that there are some missing pieces to this jigsaw puzzle.
Of course the asteroids *could* have been originally some of those bodies before they got hammered! Is it because I want everything to be nice and tidy?
I’ve saved it, but does anyone know if a higher res. version is available? If I can convince my printer to print out a “Banner”, then I will have a full width image which should be a terrific talking-point.
By my reckoning, it is equivalent to 16 A4 sheets (portrait mode), with about 15-20 mm borders at top and bottom. You could spring for a few more pages worth to have a full A4 height borderless. That would be 4.2 meters, about 14 feet long. Or go the whole hog and get those people who print Airport advertising signs to produce your mural!
Ivan.
May 26th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
They’re very enthusiastic, and optimistic, but so far, Saturn and Jupiter have more pull …
May 26th, 2007 at 8:16 pm
Hey Phil have you seen this video yet would make a nice front page video:
Stars and Planets in scale
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r22t-A-eJ3k&mode=related&search=
May 26th, 2007 at 11:33 pm
Also I noticed that EARTH is King of the Rockies! Yeah, how ’bout that.
How does that factor into the equation re likely parameters for the existence of life?
Anywhere?
Ivan.