The Magic School Bus

Students travel through the Milky Way.

Students in Astronomy I: Earth to the Milky Way's Edge blasted off in a Pomfret bus down Route 44/169. They were on a mission to understand the size of objects in our solar system and their distance from the Sun on a more familiar scale.

*The Pomfret model of the solar system. Graphic by Josh Lake.*

With their pilot, Science Department Head and Director of the Olmsted Observatory Josh Lake, behind the wheel, they launched their mission from the Sun — the traffic light at the four-way intersection of Route 44/169 and Route 97, outside of the Vanilla Bean.

The first stop, Mercury, was only 60 meters away, followed closely by Venus — 106 meters from the traffic light. At each stop, students held up a circular or spherical object that represented the size of their object in relation to the Sun, a large yoga ball. They went on to share three interesting facts about their object, such as a day on Venus is longer than a year because the planet takes longer to rotate once on its axis than to complete one orbit of the Sun. Students also reported the distance between their object and the Sun in astronomical units (AU) and on the Pomfret scale.

*Philomena Topham ’23 describes Jupiter as the size of a dining hall bowl.*

Continuing their journey, Earth was 150 meters from the traffic light, and Mars was located at the intersection of Kings Highway and Route 44/169, 74 meters away. Jupiter, the size of a dining hall bowl, was approximately 740 meters from the light and fell in the middle of the Rectory School’s pond. Saturn landed at the crosswalk between Clark Chapel and the Lasell Alumni House in the model. The traffic light was no longer visible in the rearview mirror at the first two gas giants and was a distant memory as the Pomfret bus traveled down Route 44/169 to the next stop.

“Think about all this dark emptiness in space,” Lake said to the busload. “There is nothing between Saturn and Uranus for 10 AU, the equivalent of 900 million miles in space.” The bus stopped at the Pomfret post office, where Uranus landed in the scale model, before traveling the longest distance between objects — 1550 meters — to Neptune, located at the traffic light at the intersection of Route 169 and Route 101.

The bus turned around after the students learned about two trans-Neptunian objects, which are any minor planets in the solar system that orbits the Sun at a greater average distance than Neptune. The dwarf planet Pluto was in sight, only 712 meters away. The dwarf planet Eris, however, would be located 10 kilometers from Neptune, at Black Pond Brews. The students were shocked to learn how far Pluto and Eris were from the sun but were stunned when Mr. Lake shared how close the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, was to the Sun on the Pomfret model — all the way around the Earth plus the distance from Pomfret to Detroit, MI.

“The field trip really made me understand just how much empty space there is in the solar system,” explained Dolan Pols ’23.

The class learned about other examples of the size of the solar system, including permanent displays in Maine and Sweden and temporary ones set up in the desert and on a football field. While the bus ride and their demonstration was not the first scale model of the solar system, it was the most magical.