Mind Blown

All the planets in our solar system can fit in the space between the Earth and Moon.

Nobody knows who first used the word 'space' to refer to the depths of the cosmos. What we do know is that whoever it was absolutely nailed it - our universe is mind-blowingly massive.

The Moon is the Earth's nearest celestial neighbour, and our only permanent natural satellite. We can look up to the sky every night (and some days) and there it is, locked in orbit with us.

Don't be fooled into thinking that, just because we can see it, the Moon is literally nearby. This neighbour lives an enormously long way fromus. The total distance from Earth to the Moon is a jaw-dropping 384,400 kilometres. It's SO far away that when Apollo 11 first journeyed there,it took almost three days to arrive at the Moon. Travelling the same distance, you could do almost ten full circles of the Earth!

Understanding just how huge our universe is, or the sizes of all of the weird and wonderful things that fill it, is astronomically hard to do.

If you added together the diameters of all the planets in our solar system as per NASA's

measurements they would equal 380,028kilometres. That massive number is smaller than the distance from Earth to the Moon! This means that all the planets could fit in the space between Earth and the Moon, with room to spare - 4372 kilometres, to be precise.

Of course,Pluto is once again counted as a planet - albeit with dwarf status and

those figures don't include it. But it too could squeeze in, with its teeny 2300 kilometres of width, and the planets still wouldn't need to bump up against each other!