Sweden Solar System

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Sweden Solar System stretches the length of a country. At its heart sits Avicii Arena in Stockholm, the largest hemispherical building in the world, standing 110 metres across and representing the Sun at a scale of 1 to 20 million. One metre of Swedish ground equals 20,000 kilometres of actual space. Travel far enough north along the Baltic coast, and you eventually reach Kiruna, above the Arctic Circle, where a foundation plate marks the edge of the heliosphere, 950 kilometres from where you started.

  This is not a museum exhibit or a temporary installation. It is a permanent, outdoor, living model of the Solar System, planted across real Swedish geography. The question it quietly asks is startling: how big is the space we live in, when you have to drive for hours just to reach the outer planets?

• 2. The Scale Problem

  ›

  Nils Brenning, a professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and Gösta Gahm, a professor at Stockholm University, devised the scale that makes the system work. At 1:20,000,000, the inner planets cluster within Stockholm itself, while the gas giants push outward to nearby cities. Jupiter, 7.3 metres in diameter, sits inside a hotel at Stockholm Arlanda Airport, about 40 kilometres from the Globe.

  The numbers become stranger as you move outward. Saturn, 6.1 metres across, stands in a square in the centre of Uppsala, roughly 73 kilometres from Stockholm. By the time you reach Sedna, a dwarf planet candidate, you are in Luleå, 734 kilometres to the north. Sedna itself represents a body whose actual distance from the Sun varies between 11 and 140 billion kilometres, traced by a highly elliptical orbit. The model cannot fully capture that range, but placing Sedna's 10-centimetre sculpture in an Arctic science centre communicates the sense of vast, cold distance in a way that a diagram cannot.

• 3. Objects and Their Places

  ›

  Each body in the Sweden Solar System was placed with some attention to local meaning. Neptune, 2.5 metres across and made of acrylic, was sited beside the river Söderhamnsån in Söderhamn, a coastal town with a tradition of fishing and sailing. The choice connected the god of the seas to a community built around water. At night the model glows with a blue light.

  Pluto and its largest moon Charon rest near the southern of the Dellen lakes in Delsbo, 300 kilometres from the Globe. The Dellen lakes are thought to have been formed by a meteorite impact 90 million years ago, and the sculptures stand on two pillar-like supports made of dellenite, a rare mineral created by that same impact. Pluto as the deity of death, placed at an ancient impact site, on stone that the impact itself made, is the kind of layered detail the project's designers clearly enjoyed.

  The near-Earth asteroid Eros was placed at Mörbyskolan in Danderyd on the 14th of February 2000, created as a Valentine's Day project in gold and shaped after Eros, the god of love. Its actual dimensions in the model are 2 by 0.7 by 0.7 millimetres.

• 4. Art, Vandalism, and Repair

  ›

  Not all of the models survived intact. The original Venus model, made by the American artist Daniel Oberti, was inaugurated during a Venus transit on the 8th of June 2004. It fell and shattered around the 11th of June 2011. A replacement was eventually placed at Vetenskapens hus at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

  Uranus was vandalized, and a new model was reconstructed behind Stora magasinet in Lövstabruk in 2012. The replacement is an outdoor structure made of blue steel bars, with the planet's famously tilted rotation axis marked in red. Saturn's mat model in Uppsala was also taken down due to vandalism at some point, with plans noted for it to eventually support a school planetarium.

  Mercury, by contrast, is a small metallic sphere, 25 centimetres across, built by the artist Peter Varhelyi and placed at Stockholm City Museum in 1998. Mars, 35 centimetres in diameter, was made in copper by the Finnish artist Heikki Haapanen and features marks representing typical Martian chemical elements. An umbilical cord of sorts connects it to a steel plate on the floor bearing an image of Earth.

• 5. The Far Edge

  ›

  Past Sedna, the Sweden Solar System does not end with a sculpture. The Termination Shock, the boundary where the solar wind drops to subsonic velocity, is represented only by a foundation plate at the Institute of Space Physics in Kiruna, 950 kilometres from Stockholm. No sculpture has been built yet, but the foundation waits.

  Eris, 13 centimetres in diameter and made by the artist Theresa Berg, was placed at Umeå Arts Campus in 2007. The golden model draws directly on the myth of Eris, the goddess who sparked conflict among three Greek goddesses by producing a golden apple inscribed with the word kallistē, meaning "to the most beautiful one". The dwarf planet Eris was named for that story because its discovery triggered a dispute about what a planet actually is, a debate that ended with Pluto's reclassification. Placing a golden sculpture carrying that mythological charge in an arts campus in Umeå, 518 kilometres north of Stockholm, is one of the quieter arguments for why the Sweden Solar System is more than a teaching aid. The model continues to grow: 471926 Jörmungandr, a minor planet, was added to an office in Stockholm as recently as the 23rd of September 2023.