"Planets of the Solar System to scale. Jupiter and Saturn (top row), Uranus and Neptune (top middle), Earth and Venus (bottom middle), Mars and Mercury. If the Sun-Neptune distance were scaled to the length of a football or soccer field of about 100 meters long, the Sun would be less than 3 cm in diameter (about two-thirds that of a golf ball), the gas giants would all be less than 3 mm across (smaller than a BB pellet) and Earth's diameter and the other terrestrial planets would be less than 0.3 mm (smaller than a flea)." #science #astronomy #solar_systems #pub

"For example, a star like the Sun is about a billion times as bright as the reflected light from any of the planets orbiting it. In addition to the intrinsic difficulty of detecting such a faint light source, the light from the parent star causes a glare that washes it out. For those reasons, very few of the extrasolar planets reported as of April 2014 have been observed directly, with even fewer being resolved from their host star." -- two interesting stats - Less than 5% have been discovered directly. It seems like more were discovered in 2014 than all previous years combined. #astronomy #interesting #science #%wiki #stars #solar_systems #pub