Using a football field, a drone, some peas, a few pepper flakes, grapes, and some people playing soccer, Mark Rober cleverly built what is probably the easiest to understand scale model of our solar system. What’s even more interesting is that he included Planet Nine too in the scale model just to show how damn far that mystery planet ten times the mass of Earth is. If the Sun was a soccer ball and if Earth was the size of a head of a pin orbiting 26 yards away, Planet Nine (represented with a pea) would be 17.5 miles away from all of that. Far!
The neatest trick in this scale model is Rober’s use of the drone. At distances that become much too far to see the soccer ball Sun, the drone gets shot straight up in the air to let us see exactly where the orbits of each planet is in relation to each other.