This Solar System Video Will Space Out What We’ve Learned So Far

Two American filmmakers redefine our understanding of the size of our solar system with their scale model.

Turns out all the images and models of the solar system we Earthlings learned since our childhood were deceptive.

This film tells us exactly how wrong.

These Are the Images of the Earth and the Moon We Commonly See

Here’s Wylie Overstreet, one of the filmmakers, demonstrating the distance between both the heavenly bodies to scale.

Yes, They’re REALLY FAR from Each Other

In a brain exploding video that captures the sheer size of the solar system, Wylie says:

There are 24 people in the entire history of the human species – billions of people – who have actually seen the full circle of the earth with their own eyes.

So in order to build a scale model of the solar system, Wylie along with his friend Alex Gorosh, set out to a dry lakebed in Nevada.

Spread across 7 square miles, they spent about 36 hours filming a time-lapse video after measuring the relative distance between planets and their orbits.

Setting the location of the Sun at the centre, the team placed LED-lit marbles representing different planets across the orbits they traced.

After placing Neptune (yes, there’s no Pluto), they drove around the planets with a light, when the real sun had set. The result of the stunning time-lapse video shows how large the distance is between the orbits of each planet.

The team created a model of the Sun which would be the same size as that of the real Sun as it rose in the morning. They then ‘went’ to the Earth’s orbit to draw a comparison between the size of our planet and the Sun.

The Earth is Really that Small?

The video was staged and shot in Black Rock Desert, Nevada, home to the infamous Burning Man festival. “We knew we couldn’t do this alone, so we assembled a team of highly intelligent goofballs,” Alex said in the ‘Making the Solar System’ video.

We are on a marble floating in the middle of nothing. When you sort of come face-to-face with that, it’s... it’s staggering.
— Wylie Overstreet