- [Announcer] Curiosity and wonder, let's discover together.

It's Science Wow!

- Hi, I'm Helen!

I'm an educator here at Tellus Science Museum in Cartersville, Georgia.

And today we're gonna be making a pocket solar system.

We all learn about the planets, we even learn the names of the planets, but our pocket solar system is going to show us just how far apart our planets are from the Sun, as well as from each other.

So you're gonna need a piece of paper.

You can take a regular A4-size piece of paper, divided into fours lengthwise.

Once you cut those apart, go ahead and tape them together, and you'll end up with a nice long strip of paper like this.

Now I have some machine adding tape, so I'm actually gonna use that in order to make my pocket solar system.

So our first step is, on the one end of our pocket solar system, we're gonna write the word "Sun".

Our Sun is gonna to be on the first end of our pocket solar system and then all the way at the other end, we're going to write the word "Kuiper Belt".

Now our Kuiper Belt is on the edge of our solar system.

It's where we find a lot of debris left over when our solar system was first formed.

Our next step is to go ahead and fold our strip of paper in half, the Sun to the Kuiper Belt.

I'm gonna go ahead and push down and give it a really good crease, and then I'm going to go ahead and unfold it again.

And on this crease we're going to write the name of our very first planet, and the name of this planet is Uranus.

Uranus is right there in the middle of our solar system.

Now, once we've written Uranus in the middle, go ahead and fold the solar system in half again.

And then, fold it in half one more time.

And again, I like to give it a really good crease.

Go ahead and unfold it, and we should have two more crease lines on either side of Uranus.

Making our way towards the crease line between Uranus and the Sun, on that line, we're going to write the next planet, and this is going to be our planet Saturn.

Write Saturn on that crease, and then I'm gonna find the other crease between Uranus and the Kuiper Belt, and that is going to be out planet Neptune.

Neptune is our furthest planet from the Sun.

So we now have the Kuiper Belt, Neptune, Uranus and Saturn.

Let's go ahead and do some more folding to get the rest of our planets in.

We're changing it up a little, this time.

we're going to fold the Sun to Saturn.

Once we open it up, on that new crease line, we now have Jupiter.

We now have all four of our outer gas planets in our pocket solar system.

So let's go ahead and see if we can fit our four inner planets in this little space.

We're going to follow the sun down to Jupiter, make a nice new crease line, and when we open it up, we're not putting a planet there, we're actually going to put the asteroid belt.

Now, the asteroid belt separates our inner planets from our outer planets, there's a lot leftover debris that we find in the asteroid belt as well.

Now we do have a very small, little space to fit in our four inner planets, but I think we can do it.

So we're going to fold the Sun to the asteroid belt, open that back up, and on that crease line, we're going to write the the word "Mars".

I'm going to write it on the side, not right in the middle.

Alright, three more planets to go.

This is our tricky fold, though.

So we're going to fold the Sun to Mars, and then we've got one more fold to make.

We're going to fold this fold over one more time.

Alright, let's go ahead and unfold that little fold and we should have three new crease lines.

Now on the crease line closest to Mars, that's going to be our planet Earth.

The crease up from Earth is gonna be Venus.

And finally that crease closest to the Sun is our final planet, Mercury.

And there have our pocket solar system, showing us our planets and the distance they are from each other.

Now, I was lucky enough at the museum to find some stickers laying around, I went and decorated my pocket solar system with some stickers to show me my different planets.

You may not have stickers laying around at your home, but I bet you have some crayons or some colored pencils so you can decorate your pocket solar system too.

I hope you enjoyed making our pocket solar system and have a great day.