The amazing scale of the solar system unfolds before your eyes Quick: Picture the solar system.
Do you see nine planets on tidy rings around the Sun? Then you have been lied to! It's not
without reason: We have to draw the solar system that way to fit it on a placemat a lunchbox
or in an ordinary book. But that familiar diagram is wrong about almost everything?and so this
is no ordinary book. Seven gatefold pages open out not once but twice capturing our planetary
neighbors at scale. At a trillion-to-one scale the Sun is about the size of a dime. And five
feet away from the Sun we find . . . Earth the size of a pinhead. A trillion-to-one scale is
not nearly small enough to fit our solar system into a book (or onto a soccer field)! How small
do we need to go? Unfold the next three spreads to find out . . .
