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fit
together.
I ran into this intriguing infographic over on Reddit that claimed that you could fit all
the planets of the Solar System within the average distance between the Earth and the
Moon. I thought it would be a good idea to double check the math, just to be absolutely
certain. I pulled my numbers from NASA's Solar System Fact Sheets, and they're a little
different from the original infographic, but close enough that the comparison is still
valid.
Planet
Mercury
4,879
Venus
12,104
Mars
6,771
Jupiter
139,822
Saturn
116,464
Uranus
50,724
Neptune
49,244
Total
380,008
The average distance from the Earth to the Moon is 384,400 km. And check it out,
that leaves us with 4,392 km to spare.So what could we do with the rest of that
distance? Well, we could obviously fit Pluto into that slot. It's around 2,300 km across.
Which leaves us about 2,092 km to play with. We could fit one more dwarf planet in
there (not Eris though, too big).
The amazing Wolfram-Alpha can make this calculation for you automatically: total
diameter of the planets. Although, this includes the diameter of Earth too.