You Could Fit All the Planets Between the Earth and the Moon

By Fraser Cain - October 25, 2014 at 11:58 AM UTC | Planetary Science

I ran into this intriguing infographic

over on Reddit

that claimed that you could fit all the planets of the Solar System within the average distance between the Earth and the Moon.

I'd honestly never heard this stat before, and it's pretty amazing how well they tightly fit together.

But I thought it would be a good idea to doublecheck the math, just to be absolutely certain. I pulled my numbers from

NASA's Solar System Fact Sheets

, and they're a little different from the original infographic, but close enough that the comparison is still valid.

PlanetAverage Diameter (km)Mercury4,879Venus12,104Mars6,771Jupiter139,822Saturn116,464Uranus50,724Neptune49,244Total380,008

The

average distance from the Earth to the Moon

is 384,400 km.

And check it out, that leaves us with 4,392 km to spare

.

So what could we do with the rest of that distance? Well, we could obviously fit

Pluto

into that slot. It's around 2,300 km across. Which leaves us about 2,092 km to play with. We could fit one more dwarf planet in there (not Eris though, too big).

The amazing Wolfram-Alpha can make this calculation for you automatically:

total diameter of the planets

. Although, this includes the diameter of Earth too.

A nod to

CapnTrip

on Reddit for

posting this

.