Summing up the diameters of all planets (except earth) is 380018 km, which is between the range for the lunar distance. The average lunar distance is 384399 km.
The lunar distance from the Wikipedia entry is from center of earth to center of moon, so if we want to be more precise we would need to subtract the radius of both earth (6371 km) and moon (1737 km), in order to find the distance between their surfaces.
So on average we have: distance from surface of earth to the moon = average lunar distance earth radius - lunar radius = 384399 - 6371 - 1737 = 376291 km
Which means that putting all the planets side by side, starting from the surface of the earth, we could fit them but not on an average day, we’d need the moon to be a bit above the average distance :-)
I'm pretty sure I've seen an infographic of this maybe a decade or more ago, but it was also a fact on No Such Thing As A Fish (the QI elves podcast) recently. I wonder if the Reddit poster picked it up from them.
What happens as you pile mass into a planet is that the planet becomes dense, not large, and this is because of gravity.
Jupiter has more than twice the mass of Saturn, but is only moderately larger in diameter.
You can keep dumping mass into a planet, and it just won't get much bigger, until you have enough mass that fusion kicks off, and then suddenly the now-a-star inflates, because it becomes extremely hot and then you have something the size of the Sun.
> What happens as you pile mass into a planet is that the planet becomes dense, not large, and this is because of gravity.
It's more complexe than this. Yes Jupiter is twice as dense as Saturn, but so is Uranus, which is much smaller.
Also the main reason for why Jupiter is just moderately larger than Saturn is that, at equal density, mass goes as the cube of diameter. If Jupiter had a density as low as Saturn, its diameter would only be 26% higher than it is today, and just 50% bigger than Saturn despite being 3.3 times as heavy.
So it's including the atmosphere in the radii of those planets (apparently one counts the atmosphere up to minimum 1 bar as part of the radius for gas giants).
Do we even know what's inside the gas giants, how big is the rocky core inside (if any)? Having probes dive inside of the gas giants for exploration would be an awesome space mission!
Alternatively, this shows just how far the planets actually are from each other, relative to their diameters. Look for articles about "scale model of solar system" for some more interesting reading, e.g.:
what I personally found mind blowing was insight into earth at scale. if you go for 1mm==10km then earth has 4m equatorial circumference, 1.28m diameter. bat that scale, Mt Everest is .8mm, the Mariana trench is 1.1mm
and the distance from Nuremberg where I live to Erlangen "next door" is 1.6mm, and Germany is the size of my hand, and.big enough to have visible curvature.
the outer 60km, that is 6mm at this scale, are solid, then it's dough, some places even pudding or outright liquid. the crust is* an eggshell, swimming on the inside of earth.
breathable atmosphere is just a teensy thin .5mm layer, overall it's 2mm.
such a model should be in every school, to me it's a deeply humbling experience, reminding me of the fragility of our habitat.
Next time you see the moon, cover it over with your thumb or index finger extended to arms length. The angular diameter of the moon (and sun, for that matter) are really tiny.
Your brain just imagines that you see it closer/bigger when looking at it, especially if it's near the horizon/through branches/other things on the ground. This effect gets more pronounced the longer you stare at it. I think this is why it's so hard to get a picture of the moon that looks like how you see it, unless you use an impractically long lens.
This is one of those things that seems incredible at first, but when you think about it, isn't actually that strange at all: Yes, some of these planets are massive, but the problem has always been (in observing or visiting them) their vast distance from Earth, not their actual sizes.
what makes it incredible is not the fact itself but the visualization and the realization of it.
i wasn't aware of the fact, and even though after thinking about it it's kind of obvious, the visualization really helps to let the fact sink in and make it memorable.
They really did a fantastic job with Wheatley. The comedy style isn't for everyone (my wife for example hates it) but for me it is incredibly enjoyable
The thing is that it doesn't look to scale to me. But that's probably because most other visualizations/models are not right. Especially in the distances. I checked some other images and while the planets seem to scale, my brain multiplies the size of the planets with the distance ratio.
Super Jupiter soup. If it could pull in the asteroid belt too, who knows maybe start a red dwarf binary star system. Would be one hell of a ride in any case.
The sun contains 99.86% of the solar system's mass. Jupiter contains .2%. The other gas giants make up the rest, and everything else combined rounds down to zero. You could dump everything from Mercury to the Oort cloud into Jupiter and it's still not enough mass to turn it into a star.
It varies between 360000km and 405000km ish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_distance