Time & view
Jump to a world
Every world, side by side
The four inner planets are rock and metal. The four outer ones are gas and ice giants with no solid surface to stand on. Tap any card to load that world into the explorer above.
Getting your head around the scale
The distances are the hardest part of the solar system to picture, because no diagram that fits on a screen can draw them honestly. A few anchors that help:
Sunlight is old news
Light leaving the Sun right now takes about 8 minutes 20 seconds to reach Earth — and over 4 hours to reach Neptune. When you look at Neptune through a telescope, you see it as it was hours ago.
Earths fit inside the Sun
By volume, roughly 1.3 million Earths would fit inside the Sun. Jupiter, the largest planet, could hold about 1,300 Earths — and Jupiter itself is only a tenth the Sun's width.
The Moon is farther than it looks
Line up the other seven planets in the gap between Earth and the Moon and they would just fit — side by side their diameters total about 380,000 km, against an average Earth–Moon distance of 384,400 km. Space is mostly exactly that: space.
The Sun — G-type star, 4.6 billion years old
Everything in this explorer orbits a fairly ordinary star that holds 99.86% of the system's mass. Its core fuses 600 million tonnes of hydrogen every second at 15 million °C, and it has enough fuel to keep shining for roughly another 5 billion years.