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1 vote
If the solar system shrank so that the sun were located just one centimeter from Earth, about how far away could you find the next nearest star?

asked
User Ylcnky
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8.1k points

1 Answer

4 votes
E S *

The "E" represents Earth, "S" represent Sun, and the "*" represents the nearest star(which is Proxima Centauri).

The main thing to worry about here is units, so ill label everything out.
D'e,s'(Distance between earth and sun) = .00001581 light years
D'e,*'(Distance between earth and Proxima) = 4.243 light years

Now this is where it gets fun, we need to put all the light years into centimeters.(theres alot)
In one light year, there are
9.461 * 10^17 centimeters.(the * in this case means multiplication) or 946,100,000,000,000,000 centimeters.

To convert we multiply the light years we found by the big number.
D'e,s'(Distance between earth and sun) = 1.496 * 10^13 centimeters
D'e,*'(Distance between earth and Proxima) =
4.014 * 10^18 centimeters

Now we scale things down, we treat 1.496 * 10^13 centimeters as a SINGLE centimeter, because that's the distance between the earth and the sun. So all we have to do is divide (4.014 * 10^18 ) by (1.496 * 10^13 ).
Why? because that how proportions work.

As a result, you get a mere 268335.7 centimeters.

To put that into perspective, that's only about 1.7 miles

A lot of my numbers came from google, so they are estimations and are not perfect, but its hard to be on really large scales.
answered
User Salar Bahador
by
8.0k points
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