How big is the solar system?
Question:
Answer:
Our solar system is called the milky way - I went to a site called www.ask.com
and cut and paste your question exactly the way you asked it - THis turned up quite a few perfect matches to your question and all of it deals with a scale of reference, cause apparently all of the objects, suns, moons and planets in our solar syatem are really small in comparison to the size of the galaxy or solar system
also see.
http://plus.maths.org/issue15/features/o...
Big..really big.seriously though...nobody knows..it's infinite
Roughly 5,900,000,000 Km long
Too big to matter to us at this point of time...
Contrary to seely's answer the solar system is NOT called the Milky Way. Milky Way is the galaxy our solar system belongs to. Just clarifying things thats all
The solar system is anything that orbits the sun. Out of the nine planets, Pluto is (usually) the furthest away and its orbit has a radius of over 6 billion kilometers.
But there are things further out than that! The Oort cloud is a host of asteroids surrounding the sun which extends about three light years, or 30 000 000 000 km from the sun, so the solar system could be said to be 60 trillion km wide!
If you take the Solar System as being the planets (let's discount Sedna for the moment).it's about 11 light hours across in diameter, or about 12 billion kilometres. If you take it to the extremities of the Oort Cloud, it's a little over half way to the nearest stars..about 2-3 light years.
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