The Swedish Solar System: a 950-kilometer road trip

Imagine driving down a highway somewhere in Sweden and suddenly realizing you just passed Saturn. Neptune is still 150 kilometers north. This isn't science fiction — it's the Sweden Solar System, the largest scale model of the Solar System in the world.

How it works

In the late 1990s, two Swedish scientists — Professor Nils Brenning of the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) and Professor Gösta Gahm of Stockholm University — came up with something grand. They decided to place a scale model of the Solar System directly on the map of Sweden, at a scale of 1:20,000,000.

The Sun is Stockholm's Avicii Arena (formerly Globen), a huge white sphere 110 meters in diameter. In real life, it's one of the largest spherical buildings in the world. In the model, it's our star.

From there, the journey heads north:

• Mercury — 2.9 km from Globen, a 25 cm sphere at the Stockholm City Museum
• Venus — 5.5 km, a 62 cm sphere at the Observatory Museum
• Earth — 7.6 km, at the Museum of Natural History (65 cm in diameter, with the Moon nearby)
• Mars — 11.5 km, at Mörby Centrum metro station
• Jupiter — 40 km, Arlanda Airport: a glowing ring 7 meters in diameter above a hotel entrance
• Saturn — about 73 km, Uppsala
• Uranus — 146 km, Lövstabruk
• Neptune — 229 km, Söderhamn
• Pluto — 300 km, same location
• And at the very north, in Kiruna (~950 km) — the edge of the heliosphere

Why it's great for a road trip

Driving north from Stockholm along the E4 highway, you literally cross the Solar System. The distances between the planets aren't decoration — they're real scale. Between Earth and Mars is just a few minutes' drive. To Jupiter, it's already half an hour. Only then do you really start to feel the emptiness of space.

Most of the objects are free to visit. They stand by the roads, in parks, near the airport, on city squares. No tickets, no tour guides.

Fun facts

• The model includes more than 60 objects at 26 locations — planets, moons, asteroids, comets
• The first Venus model was made in 2004 but shattered; a new one was created in 2011 and placed at the Observatory Museum
• Jupiter at Arlanda Airport is surrounded by sculptures of the four Galilean moons along the hotel corridor
• The project is coordinated by the Swedish Astronomical Society