If the sun was a soccer ball in Nairobi, the next star would be in London
By MUNGAI KIHANYA
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
25 January 2026
The size of interstellar space is mind-blowing. To get a feel of it, we
may try and bring to a scale that we are accustomed to. Think about a
soccer ball: it measures about 22cm in diameter. Now, suppose we reduced
the entire planet earth to that size; how big would the sun be?
Well; the diameter of the sun is about 100 times that of the earth; so,
if the earth is shrunk to the size of a soccer ball, the sun would be
about 2,200cm, or 22m wide. That is about half the width of a football
pitch!
Now, the moon is about 384,000km from the earth. This comes to about 30
earth diameters away. Let’s pause there for a moment…the diameter of the
sun is more than three times the distance between the earth and the
moon! In the scale where the earth has been shrunk to the size of a
soccer ball, the distance to the moon comes to 660cm (22cm x 30
diameters); that is, 6.6m.
The distance to the sun is about 12,000 earth diameters (150 million
km). In our soccer ball scale, this comes to 264,000cm or 2,640m or
2.64km. If the earth was a soccer ball at the centre of Nyayo national
stadium, the sun would be located at the University way roundabout on
Uhuru Highway.
The outermost planet (Neptune) is about 350,000 earth diameters (4.5
billion km) from the sun. On our scale, it would be 77km away – or,
somewhere in Naivasha town.
If you find these distances incredible, remember that we haven’t even
gone outside the solar system... The nearest star from the sun is some
40 trillion km away. That is, over 3 billion earth diameters; therefore,
in a scale where the earth is the size of a soccer ball, the nearest
star to the sun would be located almost 700,000km away! This is almost
twice the distance to the moon Suddenly, the scale is no longer helpful
because we are not able to picture 700,000km!
We need a smaller scale…perhaps we reduce the sun to the size to the
soccer ball. Since the sun is 100 times as wide as the earth, the all we
need to do is divide the 700,000km by 100. This comes to 7,000km. So, if
the sun was in Nairobi, the nearest star would be located 7,000km away –
somewhere in London and there would be nothing in between them!
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