Our planet Earth isn’t the only ball of rock whizzing through space. There are 7 other major planets going around the Sun — and our Moon. It’s a quarter million miles away, which sounds far. But someone figured out that if you lined up all the other planets, they’d fit between Earth and the Moon!
Wee ones: What shape are Earth, the Moon, and our planet friends?
Little kids: If there are 8 planets and 1 moon in the picture, how many objects is that? Bonus: Mercury is about 3,000 miles wide, Venus is about 7,000, and Mars is about 4,000. How much of that line-up do those 3 cover together? (Hint: You can add 3 thousand, 7 thousand, and so on as if you were adding 3 apples, 7 apples…)
Big kids: Jupiter is almost 300,000 miles around at its widest point. How many 3,000-mile-wide Americas could you wrap around Jupiter? Bonus: If Earth is 8,000 miles wide and Jupiter is 88,000 miles wide, how many times as wide is Jupiter?
The sky’s the limit — for real: If you wanted to line up the 4 gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) in the last 4 slots but in some other order, how many other ways could you line them up?
Answers:
Wee ones: They are spheres, another word for ball. From the side, they look like circles.
Little kids: 9 objects. Bonus: 14,000 miles, nowhere near the width of the next biggest planet after Earth (Neptune at over 30,000 miles).
Big kids: 100 of them. Bonus: 11 times as wide.
The sky’s the limit: 23 other ways. If you keep Jupiter first, there are 3 planets that can go in the next slot; for each of those 3 choices you can put either of the remaining 2 planets in the next slot, leaving the last one for the last spot. That gives you 3x2x1 or 6 orders that put Jupiter first. But you can do this with any of the 4 planets coming first, so that gives you 4x3x2x1, or 24 orders. The one shown here is one of them, so that gives us 23 other ways.
