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NEVADA — Even though we all know the solar system is huge, it can be hard to get a sense of just exactly how large it is.
To help the world gain a greater appreciation of the Earth's size relative to other planets in their orbits, filmmakers Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh rounded up a group of friends and headed to Black Rock Desert in Nevada. There, they created a scale model of the solar system.
The stunning video of the project, posted online Wednesday, has drawn hundreds of thousands of views on multiple social media platforms. The creators of the video claim the model is the first true model of the solar system.
The only way to see a scale model of the solar system is to build one.
–Wylie Overstreet
"Every single picture of the solar system that we ever encounter is not to scale," Overstreet says in the video. "If you put the orbits to scale on a piece of paper, the planets become microscopic and you won't be able to see them. There is literally not an image that adequately shows you what it actually looks like from out there. The only way to see a scale model of the solar system is to build one."
To build a scale model with an Earth the size of a marble, the group of friends needed 7 miles of open space. They placed a sun with a diameter of about 1.5 meters in the center and dragged chain link fence behind cars to etch each planet's orbit into a dry lake bed.
Cars carrying lights traced the orbits at night to create a gorgeous time lapse that shows the movement of planets in their orbits around the sun.
"We are on a marble floating in the middle of nothing," Overstreet says. "When you sort of come face-to-face with that it's staggering."
