Why hasn’t the sun vaporized Mecury yet?
In: Physics
The visualization of distance and size in space is very distorted because most images don’t represent actual size and distances accurately (and still be “useful”).
The sun is large (very large) and Mercury is the closest planet to the sun. While this is true, relative to the size of the sun, the distance between them is very very large. The sun’s diameter is 1.4 million kilometers. The distance from the sun to Mercury is about 60m kilometers (this is over 40 time the diameter). So if you make the sun the size of a basketball, Mercury is around 10meters (30+ feet) away in relative terms.
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