Is it true, if i say a dime in malibu is the earth, the nearest star to earth is another dime in new york?

Question

so.......i'm curious as to this ratio of distance between the two dimes..............is it true that if i have a dime in malibu that we'll say represents the earth.............the nearest star to earth besides our sun of course..........would be 3000 miles away in new york???? is that true??? man o man........that is incredible. someone out there know the answer??

Answer 1

Not even close, no matter what you consider to be the closest star.

Diameter of dime: 17.91 mm = .01791 m

Diameter of earth: 12756 km = 12,756,000 m

Ratio of dime size to earth size: 12,756,000/.01791 = 712,227,806

Actual distance to Sun (closest star): 149,000,000 km

Scale distance to Sun: 149,000,000 / 712,227,806 = .2 km

Actual distance to Alpha Centauri (closest star except for the Sun): 40,000,000,000,000 km

Scale distance to Alpha Centauri: 40,000,000,000,000 / 712,227,806 = 57,114 km

So at the earth=dime scale, the Sun is about 2 football fields away, and the next nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is more than four times the real diameter of the earth, or well more than the distance of a geostationary satellite -- which are the most distant satellites we generally orbit.

Answer 2

That's probably a decent estimate.

Answer 3

A US dime is 17.91 mm.  Proxima Centauri is 4.22 light years away. A light year is 9.461×10^12 km. So Proxima Cenauri is 39,925,420,000,000 km away.  The mean radius of the Earth is 6,371.0 km which is 12,742x10^6 mm in diameter. So the scale is 12,742x10^6 / 17.91 = 711x10^6:1 At that scale, Proxima Centauri is 56,153 km away from the dime representing the Earth.  Malibu, CA is about 4,517 km from New York, NY.

So, no.  These cities are not nearly far enough apart. Perhaps a smaller dime could be made.

Answer 4

To the person who addressed the issue of the nearest star(s) burning up millions of years ago:

The Sun is our nearest star, Proxima Centauri is second.

Proxima Centauri is only 4.3 Light Years away.  If it had burned up millions of years ago, we would never have seen it to name it. The light we see from there left that star 4.3 years ago.  The light we see on Earth from the Sun left it 8 minutes ago.

There are a LOT of objects where what we see is fossil light (from millions of years ago) - M31 (Andromeda Galaxy) is one of those - at 2.2 Million Light years away, light we see now left there when man was still trying to learn how to stand upright in Africa.  However, with the life span of most stars in the billions of years range, about only .0000000001% of the stars in Andromeda have burned out at this time.

Answer 5

If earth was a dime, another star would be a basketball at least.

Answer 6

No.  The nearest star to the Earth would be about 160 yards (roughly 145 meters) away if the Earth were the size of a dime.

That star being The Sun.

Now, the next nearest star...Proxima Centauri is 4.3 light years away.

If Earth were a dime, Proxima Centauri would be approximately 40000 miles away (in round numbers).

Answer 7

I'm not sure of the exact ratio, but that's probably about right. Space is huge and the stars and many, many lightyears apart. Actually, every star you see in the sky burned up millions (or thousands, depending on how long you believe the universe has been around) of years ago. It's just taken the light that long to get here.

Answer 8

I make it that the other dime needs to be 56,100 km away, which is about the same answer as Chad and Keith P. The distance from New York to Malibu is 3,979 km so that is only 1/14th of the required distance. A dime is 17.9 mm in diameter and 1.35 mm thick, which is a ratio of 13:1, so if you took Earth's diameter to be the thickness of a dime instead of its diameter, you'd be fairly close.

Answer 9

The nearest star is the sun, which is 93 million miles away from us.  You could calculate it by using the diameter of the dime and the diameter of the Earth (at the equator it's 7,926.41 miles or 12,756.32 kilometers).

Of course it would be more like a beach ball in New York, but that won't affect your calculations.  You are working from the dime compared to the Earth and 93 million miles vs 3,000 miles.

D1 = diameter of the dime

D2 = diameter of Earth

M1 = distance Malibu to NY

M2 = distance Earth to Sun

D1/M1 = D2/M2

Just convert your numbers to the same units, plug them in and see if the above equation is true.

Answer 10

If the earth were the size of a dime (18mm across), the nearest star would be 36,200 miles way.  That's more than the circumference of the earth.  The sun would be 6 feet 5 inches across and 690 feet from the earth.  Here's another perspective:  if the sun were the size of the dime, the nearest star (Alpha Centauri) would be another dime 330 miles away.