The Solar System in Perspective

If the diameter of the sun is our unit for length, the orbits come out something like this (someone check my math):

distance	diameter	planet
0	1.000	Sun
39	0.004	Mercury
72	0.009	Venus
100	0.009	Earth
153	0.005	Mars
520	0.102	Jupiter
956	0.086 (0.179)	Saturn (rings)
1919	0.037	Neptune
3008	0.036	Uranus

This means, if you wanted to build a scale model of the Solar System with Sun as a 1m diameter beach ball in the middle of your lounge, Mercury would be a 4mm speck 39m away! Jupiter would look good as a 10cm striped ball half a click away while the Oort cloud, at the outer reaches, is at 5000km... which would put the final touches of your model about an eighth (45deg) of the way around the Earth from your lounge.

I'm bringing this up because of a movie circulating the internets that appears to show a planet-sized comet impacting the Sun and spraying the solar system with gobs of Sun-stuff. Hopefully these figures will give a wee bit of perspective. Space is big, really big!

Wikipedia on CMEs