Found this little gem... Aren't those little balls cute? There are more images at: http://www.rense.com/general72/size.htm (I wouldn't bother looking at the rest of the website if I were you) Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Pop quiz - take a guess before you look it up. If that Earth is marble-sized (say 1cm, or 3/8" across), and Jupiter is softball sized (say 10cm, or 4" across), then how big would the Sun be? About basketball size? Bigger? Smaller?
About the size (or larger) of one of those giant marble balls which are placed on pedestals which pump out water so as to rotate the sphere.
It's the comparisons between our sun and the other stars that blew my mind. Some of those red giants are, well... pretty big. Possibly even bigger than the universe. :bugeye:
There're near 200 extrasolar planets known, and some of these are larger than Jupiter. There's this list from 2005 http://www.citebase.org/cgi-bin/ful...pdf&identifier=oai:arXiv.org:astro-ph/0508317 The biggest planet in that list is HD209458b with a radius of 1.43 Jupiter radius. The great part of the planets in that list have unknown radius. Does somebody know if some extrasolar planet has been determined to have a radius superior to 1.43 Jupiter radius?
How could that be? Please read a bit about the universe and the stars within it. It will help you greatly.
Some of the Books in my Library are bigger than my library .. I believe redarmy11 meant solar system instead of Universe..
No-one answered this exactly yet, although Communist Hamster is right.. The Sun is almost exactly ten times the diameter of Jupiter, so would be a metre across; three foot three.
That is about the maximum size for a planet, no matter how massive; if it gets any more massive the planet simply becomes more dense. Larger than 13 Jupiter masses or thereabouts the planet would technically be a brown dwarf, although a small brown dwarf would not be much different to a large Jupiter.
I think selling a planet set to scale could be good business. I think there are 8 official planets, and Pluto is an unofficial planetoid.
What single star has the largest diameter? I was not sure if VV Cephei is the largest single star or the largest binary system.
The problem is in the huge range. if Mercury is the size of a tic-tac, then the Sun is about a metre. Placing them at the right distances is even worse - at that scale, Earth is maybe a hundred metres from the Sun, and Neptune is several kilometres away!
Actually Pluto is considered a planet with full rights by the IAU (against my will..). This can be changed in September 2006, when an official definition of what constitutes a planet will be announced by the IAU
I hope the change will state that to be defined a planet it has to have a surface. Gasballs are just that and don't deserve a classification as a planet.