Retorts

Fibonacci Solar System

I would like to offer another "solution" to the question of the distance between "our" sun and the planets of "our" solar system. I am a secondary science teacher at a Waldorf school (Rudolf Steiner school) and while I was preparing a lesson using examples from nature where the Fibonacci numbers and the golden section can be found, I had this idea of trying to find a correlation between the Fibonacci series and the planetary system.

You start with Jupiter and multiply its mean distance from the sun with 1. (Jupiter has a spiritual meaning in anthroposophy but it also is the planet in the middle.) The mean distances of the Asteroid belt, Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury are found by dividing Jupiter's mean distance by the next number in the Fibonacci series (2, 3, 5, 8 and 13). Traveling outwards you multiply instead of divide Jupiter's mean distance with 2, 3, 5, and 8 to find the distances of Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

With a bit of imagination you can almost "see" an inward and outward "spiralling" of the distances.

	Actual distance (AU)	Titius-Bode	Fibonacci
Mercury	0.3871	0.4	0.4002
Venus	0.7233	0.7	0.6503
Earth	1.0000	1.0	1.0406
Mars	1.5237	1.6	1.7343
Asteroids	2.0-3.3	2.8	2.6014
Jupiter	5.2028	5.2	5.2028
Saturn	9.5388	10.0	10.4056
Uranus	19.1914	19.6	15.6084
Neptune	30.0611	38.8	26.014
Pluto	39.5294	77.2	41.6224

Rupert Holzapfel, Napier