If our Sun were the size of a doorway, how far away would Alpha Centauri be in the analogy?
Answer
Several thousand miles away
The text illustrates the immense scale separating celestial objects by using a scaling analogy involving the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri. By shrinking our Sun down to the size of a standard doorway, the sheer vastness of interstellar space becomes apparent. In this highly reduced model, the representation of Alpha Centauri would still be located thousands of miles away. This immense separation demonstrates why the gravitational influence exerted by any single distant star on Earth is so negligible—the distance acts as an overwhelming barrier, minimizing any potential attractive force exerted across that gulf of space.
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