Sweden Solar System | Hacker News Reader

Sweden Solar System

en.wikipedia.org

158 pointstitaniumtown46 comments

Walking from Globen (the sun) to Naturhistoriska (the earth) could be made into a quite nice 10 km walk, with possible detours to see much of the old worker's town of Södermalm, the old town, the city center around Klara/Norrmalm, the urban residential area Sibirien, the university and finally ending up at the science museum Naturhistoriska.

The Stockholm novels by Per Anders Fogelström starting with "City of My Dreams" largely plays out across that walk, if you're interested in the 19th/20th century evolution of the city and its working class.

The metro's art project is also pretty cool if you take the subway when you're in Stockholm, with unique artwork at each station (spanning from a few pieces almost hidden away next to the ad billboards to the whole station decorated to an elaborate theme).

The sun is represented by the spherical Avicii Arena, which used to be the largest spherical building in the world. That is, until Las Vegas' Sphere was built. Now the United States have the opportunity to create an even larger solar system model!

The Las Vegas sphere is pretty large. I’m not sure how it compares to the dome at Siding Springs but in sure that would be a very large scale model. https://www.visitnsw.com/destinations/country-nsw/warrumbung...

I do find it frustrating on Wikipedia that when you click on the map to enlarge it the markers vanish.

I understand why, but the hyperlink should be to a bigger map viewer, not the bare underlying image.

yeah, thats definitely a bug in the specs

I dunno why but WP detests interactive features for some reason and the few that do exist are disabled in the mobile view (e.g. collapsible sections). Another example: all those tables where measurements are spelled out twice, in metric and imperial, wasting a huge amount of screen space and making everything harder to read instead of having a "[mm] [in]" switch once per table or page.

There’s an entire solar system hiding inside Sweden - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36687868 - July 2023 (1 comment)

The Sweden Solar System (world’s largest model of our planetary system) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32944427 - Sept 2022 (3 comments)

The Sweden Solar System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26424090 - March 2021 (72 comments)

Sweden Solar System Photos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8181696 - Aug 2014 (2 comments)

Sweden Solar System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8167192 - Aug 2014 (40 comments)

The Sweden Solar System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2220903 - Feb 2011 (26 comments)

I’m actually quite surprised there isn’t a Tom Scott video about this! I half expected the link to take me to his final video and this be the title.

I live close by "Earth" and "Mars". "Earth" is one of the few pieces made to depict its planet somewhat accurately, with the continents correct and the moon at the correct distance and (almost) correct size. Unfortunately the Natural History museum it is in is closed for renovation so you can't go there at the moment.

Most of the other pieces, are more art than science. "Mars" looks more like an old-fashioned soccer ball than the planet, IMHO.

Is it a coincidence that the scaled earth's path crosses the Natural History museum?

Presumably: the Museum was built in 1916, and the Globe in 1989.

That’s evidence that it is _not_ a coincidence.

I showed this to my brother, who lives in Stockholm. His response: “Typical bloody Stockholmers, thinking everything revolves around them!” ;-)

I've been interested in scale models of the solar system (or other astronomical systems like say the moon system of Jupiter) for a while, partly to try to teach my kids stuff and partly just because I think they're cool.

My opinion is that this solar system model is too big to be useful. If you're trying to teach people about the scales of space, I think you need something humanly navigable, ideally something where you can see with a single sight-line back to the previous object in the model, or, failing that, where at least you can walk between elements of the model in a short enough time that you can kind of keep yourself on-task and thinking about the model for the whole walk.

I dunno... Earth is 4.7 mi from the sun. That's walkable.

I like that this actually gives you a sense of real meaningful distance and size. This is a sun that's still big compared to humans, and a distance to the earth that isn't negligible.

And then a real lesson about how insanely larger the solar system is when you try to get out to Jupiter and beyond.

It's walkable, but you can't see the "sun" from the "earth," and it's walkable in well more than an hour, at which point I don't think that you're really keeping the scale in mind.

We can always look at images or whatever if we want to get an intellectual sense of the scale of things. I think the advantage of a model is that you feel immersed in it, and I don't think you do at this scale.

It's challenging! It's hard to find a location and a scale which gives you this human sense of the sizes involved. At most scales, you have to make the planets pinpricks in size. But, especially for the inner system, you can make it work.

EDIT: Here's I think something that works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR3Igc3Rhfg

For a better perspective on scale, they should do a model where in 1 place you have the sun, its planets, asteroid belts etc, and (to scale!) in a 2nd place you have a model representing the nearest star system (Alpha Centauri).

Oh... and of course put in where Voyager, Pioneer & New Horizons probes are these days - after 40+ years of travel at ~15km/s.

I think this is near-impossible. The diameter of earth is about 12,700 km. So if the distance between the Sun and Alpha Centauri were "the maximum distance available on Earth," then the scale is 3.25 billion to 1.

The sun's radius is about 696,000 km, so 7x10^6 meters, so at 3.25 x 10^9:1 scale, it's about 2mm across. The planets would all be specks. You could see orbits, though they'd be small. And that's if you place your alpha centauri model literally "on the other side of the world" from your sol model.

I think you can do very slightly better by using great circle distances rather than straight lines cutting through the earth. After all, I think that's what this model is doing.

Sure, it could be half the circumference of the earth instead of the diameter. The circumference is pi times the diameter, so half the circumference is a little over 1.5x the diameter -- the sun could be 3mm across instead of 2mm.

Is it an actual linear scale?

The Sweden one? Seems like yes to me.

> humanly navigable

This is Sweden; I would bet that there are hiking trails connecting everything on that map, although maybe not a single one for all the planets. Roslagsleden (13 day hikes) + the first 9 etapper of Vikingaleden bring you from (close to) Mars to Uranus. And these are some nice hikes:

https://www.roslagen.se/roslagsleden

https://www.roslagen.se/vandra-vikingaleden

There's one north of Boston [1] that I accidentally found walking one time. Turns out I remembered it from a HN posting some years ago. I'd already walked some 3 mi or so by the time I walked across Neptune, so couldn't go all the way to Topsfield and back. I thought it gave a really good sense of how big space is. It's about 1 mi from Neptune to Uranus and another mile or so to Saturn (as far as I got). On my return I walked directly at a fast walking pace, so it took some 20 minutes to from Saturn to Uranus and another 20 minutes to Neptune. (Distances and times are approximate.) At the time I think I calculated my walking speed to be four times the speed of light. It's pretty awesome, in the original sense, that going 4x light speed it still takes a long time to get from one outer planet to the next.

Wikipedia has quite a list of other models [2], although it doesn't seem to include Topsfield, MA.

[1] https://www.wickedlocal.com/story/chronicle-transcript/2021/...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System_model

> If you're trying to teach people about the scales of space, I think you need something humanly navigable

The Somerset Space Walk [1] seems to be a very nice candidate for your requirements.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_Space_Walk

There is a smaller version in Zagreb as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Views

I was there this summer. It was a fun event trying to find them all.

One more in Zurich: https://www.zuerich.com/en/visit/sport/planet-trail

Hagen (in Westfalen) in Germany says Hi: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetenmodell_Hagen

Unfortunately only available in German.

Could be combined with a visit to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagen_Open-air_Museum , or the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Heritage_Trail in general.

Or if one is into such stuff, getting https://www.vormann-brauerei.de/biere/alt_aus_dahl.htm

(I usually don't like, or drink beer, but this one was very acceptable)

Seems like there could/should be one for New York -- it could use the spherical Hayden Planetarium [1] as the sun. Which would be a conveniently somewhat smaller scale.

(To be fair, it does already have scale models of the planets right next to it, just not at scale distances [2].)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Center_for_Earth_and_Spac...

[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Amnh_fg09.jpg

At scale distances from the 27m sphere planetarium (as the sun), earth would be a 24 cm sphere at distance of 2.8 km. From looking at a map, this could be a basketball somewhere a few blocks NNE of Times Square. (Pluto, however, would be 114km away. Dunno where that would be. Maybe Allentown, PA?)

This is so cool! I've wanted to make something like this for years. I did the math for using Spaceport America as the sun and Pluto would have been as far as Wyoming.

Interesting to see Oumuamua there. But it was my understanding that it was just briefly visiting our solar system and will leave us behind?

https://www.swedensolarsystem.se/en/oumuamua/

Yes, but whole system looks like it is designed as a tourist attraction anyways.

There is a smaller scale version of this on the CU campus:

https://www.colorado.edu/fiske/colorado-scale-model-solar-sy...

It is 1:10 Billion, so about a half-mile from the Sun top Pluto.

Eugene, Oregon has one as well: https://eugenesciencecenter.org/exhibits/eugene-solar-system...

Is this scale model accurate to relative sizes of the bodies, or only distance? That's something I've not been able to find out.

Both, that's the whole point of these models. Also size compared to the distance is true to scale.

Both, but they cheated a bit on the Sun. Per TFA:

> To respect the scale, the globe represents the Sun including its corona.

That's not really a meaningful measurement as the corona could extend anywhere from a few hundred thousand to a few million kilometres. If the Avicii Arena represented a more normal measurement of the sun, the rest of the planets should be ~50% greater in diameter and ~50% further dispersed. Sweden would still have room!

Very cool to see TNOs on this. I never appreciated how far away Sedna is, TIL it's not even close to the Kuiper belt!

I’d love to do a road trip visiting all these planets! When is a good time?

Any. We still have four seasons, sort of, so come on over and enjoy either while you still can.

Wouldn't recommend roadtrip in December unless you like driving in darkness.

The most northern part of this solar system is in kiruna, where next sunrise is 2nd of January and that day sun will be upp less than 30 minutes.

An experience on its own, setting it apart from what's offered through the usual "tourist traps".

Is the Vegas Sphere the largest hemispherical object?

Yes it is. The sun in this model used to be.

If my calculations are correct, at that scale of 1:20,000,000 the closest star Proxima Centauri is ~2 million km away, or 5.22 times the distance to the Moon.

Space is fucking huge.

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