Voyage

Voyage. A Journey Through Our Solar System.

"I say!" murmured Horton. I've never heard tell , Of a small speck of dust that is able to yell , So you know what I think?…Why, I think there must , Be someone on top of that small speck of dust! , Some sort of creature of very small size, , Too small to be seen by an elephant's eyes… , , Dr. Seuss, Horton Hears a Who!, 1954.

, You are standing near Pluto within a model of our solar system. The real solar system is 10 billion times larger., Take a voyage! Imagine exploring our solar system as a giant. As you travel, you encounter the Sun and its planets, each small enough to hold in your hand. Look at the map below to see where you are., The grapefruit-size Sun is a little less than half a mile (600 m) away. You are beyond the planet Neptune, where the dwarf planet Pluto is found., Would you like to visit Proxima Century, the nearest star to the Sun? At this scale it would be the size of a grape, and 2,500 miles (4,000 km) from where you are standing. That is the distance from New York City to San Francisco., The Milky Way: Our City of Stars , The Sun and all the stars that grace the night sky belong to an immense swirl of stars called the Milky Way galaxy, one of billions of galaxies in the universe. The Milky Way may have 50 stars for every person on Earth, and most stars could have their own solar systems. With all these countless other worlds, does life exist elsewhere?, If You Could Travel at the Speed of Light , Light is the fastest thing known, able to travel nearly 8 times around the Earth in a second. Exploring the space between the Sun and the next nearest star, at the fantastic speed of light, would be like exploring the continental U.S. as an ant moving 1 inch per second (2.5 cm/sec)., Our Solar System: A Family Portrait , You are at a historic spot within this model of our solar system. Just outside Pluto's orbit, in February 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft took the first photographs of the solar system from beyond the planets. Earth is one of 6 planets imagined. This is a family portrait, and you're in it., Imagine , Our solar system orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy once every 230 million years. One orbit ago, the dinosaurs roamed the Earth.