How large is our solar system?

                                                          The length of our Solar System

Over this week we found a way to put the distance between objects in our Solar system into perspective by using a different scale to walk out the distance between each planet and the sun. For this example, we chose to scale down miles into meters and this still was a very long distance between everything in our solar system, and when we got to the very end we could not see the sun from the end of the last planet. We used this as a comparison to show just how large our solar system is and how to put the distance into a perspective we can understand. 

Below is a small chart that shows the distance between our sun and the planets around it. The AU stands for astronomical units is 149.6 Million Kilometers so our planets are spaced out a lot from one another. 

Since we now know the distance between our planets we have a few people to thank for it. Christiaan Huygens was the first one to measure the distance between the sun and the earth and he did this by using the phases of Venus.  When he used these Phases he found that he could calculate the distance between them based on their phases they were in.