If you reduced the Sun to the size of an orange how far would be the nearest star from Earth?

Answer 1

The answer will be very sensitive to the number we choose for the size of an orange.

We're going to call it 4 inches in diameter.

Diameter of the sun . . . . . 863,705 miles

1 light year . . . . . 5.8787 x 1012 miles

Distance to the nearest star . . . . . 4.4 light years = 2.5866 x 1013 miles

That's all the data. Now all we have to do is crunch the numbers.

The proportion is: 863,705 miles / 4 inches = 2.5866 x 1013 miles / x

x = (4 inches) (2.5866 x 1013 miles) / (863,705 miles)

x = 4 inches (29,948,049) = 119,792,198 inches = 9,982,683 feet = 1,891 miles (3,043 km)

(Lots of rounding went on at every step of the solution, but the answer's

order of magnitude is fine.)

Answer 2

Let's see, now..... The Sun is about a million miles in diameter, and a quarter is approximately an inch in diameter. (For non-US readers, a "quarter" is a quarter-dollar coin, almost exactly the size of a 100-yen coin. I know this because Japanese vending machines would, in the early 1980's, sometimes take a quarter and read it as a 100-yen piece.)

Light travels 186,000 miles per second, and a light-year is about 5.8 TRILLION miles. There are 12 inches in a foot, and 5280 feet per mile. So there are 63,380 inches in a mile. In a scale of Sun = a quarter, a light-year would be almost 93,000,000 miles, which curiously, is almost the distance from the Sun to the Earth.

So if we were to build a scale model of the Milky Way with the Sun the size of a quarter, the Earth would be a grain of sand 8 feet away. The nearest star is 4.2 light years away, so our model of the nearest star would be in the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter in distance.

Answer 3

What we're really saying is that everything is shrunk down to the point that the sun becomes

the same size that a grapefruit used to be.

I assumed the diameter of a grapefruit is 6 inches (15.2 cm).

The ratio of (shrunken size) to (original size) is about 1.1 x 10-10 (rounded).

The earth is 53-ft from the sun.

The moon is 1.6 inches from the earth.

The distance to the nearest star is now a mere 2,577 miles (4,147 km).

Answer 4

If the Sun were the size of an orange, the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, would be roughly 11,000 kilometers away from Earth, which is equivalent to circling the Earth almost 3 times at the equator. This dramatic scale reduction puts the vast distances in space into perspective.