PROXIMA CENTAURI - Appreciating the Distance to the Nearest Star

Excerpt of some research notes for my sci fi novella (image from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_system_distances.JPG)



Let’s call the Earth-Sun distance one foot. That puts Mercury at about five inches from the Sun, and Venus at just under nine. Mars sits at a foot and a half, and then the bulk of the asteroid belt stretches from two to four feet distant. Jupiter’s at five feet, and then we really start stretching out toward the outer planets.

Saturn’s at ten feet, Uranus is at nineteen, Neptune’s at thirty, and dwarf planet Pluto in the Kuiper Belt is no less than forty feet from our tiny sun. The outer reaches of the Kuipers are 100 feet away. This is about as far as the Voyager probes have gotten after 36 years.

So, with our tiny solar system stretching just 100 feet in radius, where would that put the nearest star? Five hundred feet? A thousand?

Try fifty-one miles.

That’s right. Proxima Centauri, the nearest star at 4.25 light years, sits 271,000 AU’s from Earth and would take the Voyagers about 17,000 years to travel. By human measurements, it might as well sit in another universe.