Solar System to Scale
Scroll the real solar system at true distance — and feel how staggeringly empty space really is.
True scale: 1 pixel ≈ 140,469 km
Sunlight reaches here in 0 light-min
Still nothing but empty space…
Still nothing but empty space…
Still nothing but empty space…
The Sun
Everything orbits this. The Sun holds 99.8% of all the mass in the solar system — every planet, moon and asteroid combined is just the leftover crumbs. From here, we measure the void.
Real diameter: 1,391,000 km
Mercury
57,900,000 km
The closest planet, just 0.39 AU out. Even so, sunlight takes over 3 minutes to reach it. Tiny and airless, it races around the Sun in only 88 days.
Sunlight reaches here in 3.2 light-min
Real diameter: 4,879 km
Venus
108,200,000 km
At 0.72 AU, Venus is the hottest planet — hotter than Mercury — thanks to a runaway greenhouse atmosphere. It's the brightest planet in our night sky.
Sunlight reaches here in 6 light-min
Real diameter: 12,104 km
Earth
149,600,000 km
Home, at exactly 1 AU — the very distance used to define the astronomical unit. Sunlight you see right now left the Sun 8 minutes ago. Every human who ever lived has lived within this one pale dot.
Sunlight reaches here in 8.3 light-min
Real diameter: 12,742 km
At this distance scale, Earth would be far smaller than a single pixel.
Mars
227,900,000 km
At 1.52 AU, Mars is the last of the small rocky worlds. After here, the gap to the next planet is enormous — the first long stretch of true emptiness.
Sunlight reaches here in 13 light-min
Real diameter: 6,779 km
The Asteroid Belt
404,000,000 km
Around 2.7 AU lies a ring of rubble — yet it's so spread out that spacecraft fly straight through it without aiming to dodge anything. Mostly, it too is empty.
Sunlight reaches here in 22 light-min
Jupiter
778,500,000 km
At 5.2 AU, the king of planets — so massive that all the others could fit inside it twice over. Notice how far you had to scroll through nothing to get here.
Sunlight reaches here in 43 light-min
Real diameter: 139,820 km
Saturn
1.43 × 10⁹ km
At 9.58 AU, the ringed giant sits nearly twice as far out as Jupiter. Sunlight here is over 1,000 times fainter than on Earth, taking 80 minutes to arrive.
Sunlight reaches here in 80 light-min
Real diameter: 116,460 km
Uranus
2.87 × 10⁹ km
At 19.2 AU, Uranus is so distant that sunlight takes more than two and a half hours to reach it. It tips over on its side, rolling around the Sun like a ball.
Sunlight reaches here in 2.7 light-hr
Real diameter: 50,724 km
Neptune
4.50 × 10⁹ km
At 30 AU, the outermost planet. Sunlight takes over four hours to arrive — out here the Sun is just a very bright star. One Neptune year lasts 165 Earth years.
Sunlight reaches here in 4.2 light-hr
Real diameter: 49,244 km
Off the charts
Neptune is the edge of the planets — but not the edge of the void. At this same scale, the next markers are absurdly far below. We can't scroll there literally without making Neptune invisible, so here they are in numbers.
Humanity's most distant spacecraft is around 163 AU from the Sun — at this page's scale, roughly 177 screens further down. Its signals now take over a day to reach us.
The nearest star beyond the Sun is about 267,383 AU away — 1,544 light-days of light, or 4.24 light-years. At this scale it would be roughly 355,911 screens away: utterly, impossibly far.
You reached Neptune, the edge of the planets — and the void only deepens.
We draw the solar system squashed onto one page, so it feels cosy and crowded. It isn't. At true scale the planets are tiny specks lost in an almost perfect void. On this page distance is mapped honestly: the Sun sits at the top, Neptune at the very bottom, and the gaps between are real. Scroll down and you'll pass through long stretches of pure nothing — that emptiness is the whole point. Light, the fastest thing there is, takes 8 minutes to cross from the Sun to Earth, and over four hours to reach Neptune.
Sources: mean orbital distances and diameters from the NASA Planetary Fact Sheet; 1 AU = 149,597,870.7 km (IAU); speed of light c = 299,792.458 km/s. Distances are mean orbital distances (orbits are ellipses). Lineage: Josh Worth's 'If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel'.
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