From leading edge of Canada to outer edge of solar system<\/p>\n
Published 5:30 am Thursday, May 7, 2026<\/p>\n
Leave it to the Swedes with their Nobel Prizes and tradition of scientific inquiry to come up with a truly inspirational idea.<\/p>\n
The Nordic country is home to the world\u2019s largest scale model of our solar system. The scale for the model is one metre to 20 million metres, meaning each metre represents 20,000 kilometres.<\/p>\n
Considering the solar system on this scale, really puts the vastness of space in perspective, especially since our sun is one of a hundred billion in the Milky Way Galaxy, which is just one of millions of billions of galaxies in the universe.<\/p>\n
The bodies represented in the model include, the sun, the planets, some moons, dwarf planets and other objects such as comets.<\/p>\n
They cover the entire country from the southern town of Karlshamn, which houses Comet Swift-Tuttle, to the Termination Shock (the edge of the heliosphere where the solar wind subsides to subsonic velocity) in the northern town of Kiruna, which lies above the Arctic Circle. It is approximately, 1,350 kilometres from Karlshamn to Kiruna.<\/p>\n
The centre of Sweden\u2019s model, the Sun, is represented by the Avicii Arena (a.k.a. \u201cthe Globe\u201d) in Stockholm, the world\u2019s largest spherical building at 110 metres in diameter. It is primarily used for hockey.<\/p>\n
The model of Mercury, the closest planet to the sun is just 25 cm in diameter and sits on a pedestal just outside the Stolkholm City Museum 2.9 km from the arena.<\/p>\n
All the inner planets except Mars are in Stolkholm with the Earth (and Moon) represented at the Swedish Museum of Natural History approximately 8.58 kilometres from the Globe.<\/p>\n
Neptune, the solar system\u2019s outermost planet (sorry Pluto, no offence intended), is represented by a 2.5-metre globe in a park in the coastal town of S\u00f6derhamn, an ode to Neptune being god of the seas. It is 231 kilometres from the Globe.<\/p>\n
This is such a cool idea, but imagine what we could do with it in Canada. At 6,100 kilometres from Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Prince Rupert, we could do one almost six times the size of Sweden\u2019s.<\/p>\n
We just need a 600-metre spherical building in Toronto (since they already think they are the centre of the universe) to kick things off.<\/p>\n
Pluto would be somewhere in Alberta (kind of appropriate at the moment).<\/p>\n
And of course, we would host the Termination Shock.<\/p>\n
I know it\u2019s not going to happen, but how cool would it be?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From leading edge of Canada to outer edge of solar system Published 5:30 am Thursday, May 7, 2026…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":653942,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[49,48,66],"class_list":["post-653941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=653941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653941\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/653942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=653941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=653941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=653941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}