The massive amount of space in space.
On maps and in illustrations, the solar system often looks like a compact group of planets. But as with many maps, appearances deceive. We know the solar system is huge, but how huge is hard to grasp.
To get a feel for those distances, here are a few comparisons:
That Earth-Sun distance is also known as 1 astronomical unit (AU).
It feels far. But at solar-system scale, the Sun is actually still nearby.
Small fact: Apollo 11 took 3 days and 4 hours to reach the Moon.
On maps, areas and distances are often distorted. On world maps, Greenland often looks much larger than Africa. Why? The world is round, maps are flat.
To correct for Earth’s curvature, world maps stretch near the poles. A similar thing happens in overview images of the solar system.
To avoid mostly empty images, space between planets is compressed away.
The farther you go from the Sun, the farther planets are from each other. To keep images readable, map makers compress those gaps.
In reality, the gaps are enormous. The scaled image below gives a very different impression.
Besides the Sun, planets, and moons, millions of other objects float in our solar system. The remarkable map by Eleanor Lutz shows every discovered object larger than 10 km in diameter: 18,000 asteroids, 170 moons, 6 dwarf planets, 8 planets, and the Sun at the center.
The map is fully built from NASA open data.
At first glance the solar system looks crowded. But how crowded is it really? The asteroid belt helps answer that. It is the densest region.
On Eleanor Lutz’s map, the asteroid belt appears in blue-green between Mars and Jupiter. It contains millions of asteroids and dwarf planets. That sounds like a lot, until you consider scale.
The asteroid belt is about 1 AU wide, 1 AU thick, and has a circumference of roughly 17 AU. Immense space, even divided by millions of objects.
The average distance between two objects in the asteroid belt is estimated at over 1 million km, about three times Earth-Moon distance.
So even the busiest region is mostly empty space. Every asteroid is basically a needle in a haystack.
Want to know how Eleanor Lutz made her map? Read the technical story on her blog.
Showing huge distances on small maps is hard. We see that on Earth, and even more in space. Only when you look at real distances do you realize how much of the solar system is empty.
And that is exactly why space deserves its name.
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