A group of friends has in Nevada claim to have developed an excellent way to show the tremendous size of our solar system by creating a scale model in the Nevada desert with the help of marbles and light bulbs. The model shows planets with carefully measured planetary orbits.

After getting frustrated by pictures, portraying the distances in the solar system inaccurately, Alex Gorosh and Wylie Overstreet decided the only way to see a model to scale was to build it.
They went onto a dry lake bed in Black Rock desert, Nevada, and started building the solar system.

The friends said that they got inspired to build a scale model of solar system after a quote from James Irwin, the fourth man to land on the moon.

Irwin had said, "As we got farther and farther away, the Earth diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you can imagine . . . seeing this has to change a man."

With a scale of 1 astronomical unit per 577 feet, the scale model Mercury, Venus and Earth are, respectively, 224 feet, 447 feet and 579 feet away from the Sun.

In a time span of 36 hours, they created the model. The model had working orbits animated at night using lights for creating an amazing timelapse.

The scale was based on Earth having a size of a marble, which was orbiting around a sun, which was a meter in a half in diameter, with the reality of the distances quite staggering.

Gorosh said that to build a scale model using an Earth only as big as this marble, a person needs seven miles of empty space.

Gorosh, while telling the camera why they embarked on the project, said that he wanted to capture Earth from the view of an astronaut.

Gorosh said, “There is literally not an image that adequately shows you what it actually looks like from out there [space]. We are on marble floating in the middle of nothing, when you sort of come face to face with that, it’s staggering”.

Gorosh and Overstreet’s friends on being asked why they volunteered for the project, they gave less scientific reasons. It is always interesting to see people coming forward to increase awareness about science.