Every picture of the solar system you have ever seen is wrong in the same way, and it is not the artist's fault.

Here is the problem. The Sun is 1,392,000 kilometers across. The Earth is 12,742. You could line up 109 Earths across the face of the Sun. That is already hard to fit on a page, and it is not the hard part.

The hard part is the distance. The Earth is 149.6 million kilometers from the Sun. Neptune, the outermost planet, is 4,495 million — about 30 times further out than we are.

To see what that does to a drawing, shrink everything by the same amount. Let one meter stand for 10 million kilometers.

At that scale the Sun is a grapefruit, 139.2 millimeters across. You could hold it in one hand.

The Earth is 1.3 millimeters — a grain of coarse sand — and it sits about 15 meters away. Not fifteen centimeters. Fifteen meters, which is roughly a school bus and a half.

Jupiter, the largest planet, is 14 millimeters across, the size of a small marble, and it is 78 meters from the grapefruit. Neptune is a peppercorn 4.9 millimeters wide, 450 meters away. Put the Sun at your front door and Neptune is most of half a kilometer down the road, and far too small to see from here.

Between those objects there is nothing. Not thin air — nothing at all, for hundreds of meters of model and billions of kilometers of the real thing.

That is why the pictures lie. A page is about a quarter of a meter wide. To fit Neptune on it at the true scale, the Sun would have to be smaller than a full stop and every planet would be invisible. So the artist does the only thing available: draws the planets big enough to see, and pushes them close enough to fit. Both changes are enormous. Neither is ever mentioned.

You have probably known the names of the planets for years. What almost nobody is taught is the shape of the thing they are named in, and the shape is emptiness with a few specks in it.

There is one more consequence, and it is why spacecraft take so long. Light is the fastest thing there is, and sunlight takes 8 minutes and 19 seconds to reach us. Looking at the Sun means looking at where it was 8 minutes ago. To Neptune, that same light takes just over 4 hours.