Shrinking the solar system

As part of our learning about Guardians of the Galaxy, we read a Connected article called Shrinking the Solar System.  To get an idea of how enormous the solar system is, some students at Karori West Normal School in Wellington pegged the "planets" along a 60 metre long rope to show the distances between them to scale.

We decided to do a similar learning activity on a beautiful Friday afternoon.  Using a 100 metre rope on the school field, we worked together in different groups to explore the distances between the planets in the solar system.  We worked out that if we pegged the sun at one end of the rope, the Kuiper Belt would be 100 metres away using our scale.  The sun, Mercury,Venus, Earth and Mars are all in the first four metres of the rope - that's four big paces.  It's a very, very long way (about 25 metres using our scale) from Neptune to the Kuiper Belt.

As it says in the Connected article, there's actually a whole lot of nothing out there!