The Planets Are Very, Very, Very, Far Away

Quick: Picture the solar system. Do you see nine planets on tidy rings around the Sun? Then you have been lied to! It’s not without reason: We have to draw the solar system that way to fit it on a placemat, a lunchbox, or in an ordinary book. But that familiar diagram is wrong about almost everything – and so this is no ordinary book. Seven gatefold pages open out not once but twice, capturing our planetary neighbors at scale. At a trillion-to-one scale, the Sun is about the size of a dime. And five feet away from the Sun, we find… Earth, the size of a pinhead. A trillion-to-one scale is not nearly small enough to fit our solar system into a book (or onto a soccer field)! How small do we need to go? Unfold the spreads to find out…