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Solar system scale

Why are the planets drawn so close together?

Because the real solar system will not fit on a screen. Neptune is about 78 times farther from the Sun than Mercury. Drawn honestly at one scale, the inner four sit in the innermost tenth of the picture. This simulator climbs a zoom ladder so something is always legible, and it tells you what is compressed.

Sun sideways pull no gravity — a straight line
A picture that shows all eight planets at once cannot also show their true sizes. The orbits in each zoom are honest; the dots are sized to be seen.

What you can trust in the picture

The orbits are to scale within one zoom level. Mercury really does lap everyone. Neptune really does barely move in a lifetime. The planet dots are not measurements: at the Saturn view, Jupiter would be a few thousandths of a pixel across. The one exception is the Earth and Moon view, which is to scale in both size and distance at once.

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Why a smooth zoom fails

Out to Mars the outermost orbit is only tens of times the innermost, and everything is separable. Out to Neptune the ratio is hundreds to one. A smooth zoom spends most of its travel in frames where nothing is legible. Each rung of the ladder is a view where something can be read.

See it live

On the hub: Solar system simulator

Related questions

How does an orbit work? At every instant a planet has a velocity — where it is already going — and gravity adds a small pull straight toward the Sun. Bend a path by the same small amount at every step and it closes. That closed path is the orbit.

What is the asteroid belt? A ring of leftover rock between Mars and Jupiter. It is not the wreckage of a planet. Jupiter’s gravity never let the rubble gather into one world. The dark gaps in it are resonances — the same tug, at the same point, over and over.

Why don’t planets fall into the Sun? They are falling. They are also moving sideways. By the time a planet has fallen, the Sun is no longer where it was falling toward. Falling and missing, without end, is an orbit. There is no outward force holding them up.

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