The solar system in 3D

This is the solar system as it is at this moment, not a diagram. Every planet, dwarf planet, moon and comet below sits at its true position, computed from JPL-derived ephemeris and updated as you watch.

Distances are real, so the emptiness is real too: the planets are tiny specks separated by enormous gaps, and the map shows that honestly rather than squeezing everything into one comfortable picture. Pick any object to fly to it and read its live distance from Earth, its light-travel time and its orbital speed.

The solar system in 3D — all 136 objects

• 16 Psyche — A metal-rich world that may be the exposed iron core of a shattered baby planet — or a jumble of metal and…
• 2024 YR4 — The asteroid that briefly topped the impact-risk charts in early 2025, when its chance of hitting Earth in…
• 3I/ATLAS — The third interstellar object ever found, and the fastest: a comet from another star system that swept…
• 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko — The duck-shaped comet that ESA’s Rosetta orbited for two years, dropping the Philae lander onto its surface.
• Achlys — An elongated plutino locked in Neptune’s 2:3 resonance, accompanied by a small moon.
• Adrastea — A tiny moon riding at the outer edge of Jupiter’s main ring. Like its neighbour Metis, it circles Jupiter…
• Amalthea — A deep-red lump skimming just above Jupiter’s cloud tops, dyed by sulfur blasted off Io and stretched by…
• Apophis — Apophis will pass safely close to Earth in April 2029. Its irregular body is reconstructed from radar…
• Ariel — Valleys and faults crisscross its young, bright face.
• Arrokoth — A pristine snowman from the dawn of the solar system: two icy lobes that drifted together gently 4.5 billion…
• Atlas — A flying saucer in orbit: ring dust settling onto Atlas’s equator built the smooth disc that makes it one of…
• Aya — A red-hued classical Kuiper Belt object, large enough that it may be nearly round.
• Bennu — A spinning-top rubble pile, mapped to centimeters by OSIRIS-REx before it grabbed a handful of the surface…
• Borisov — The first comet confirmed to come from another star, found by an amateur astronomer in 2019.
• Callisto — An ancient face unchanged for four billion years — every scar of the early solar system still on display.
• Calypso — Tethys’s trailing companion, holding station forever 60 degrees behind in the same orbit.
• Ceres — The largest object in the asteroid belt and the first asteroid ever discovered. Bright salt deposits glitter…
• Chariklo — The largest known centaur and the first small body found with rings: two thin, dense bands spotted when…
• Charon — So large relative to Pluto that the pair waltz around a point between them — the solar system’s great double…
• Chiminigagua — A scattered-disc world flung onto a wide orbit, trailed by a faint little moon.
• Chiron — Half asteroid, half comet: the first centaur ever found wanders between Saturn and Uranus and sometimes…
• Daphnis — A five-mile moonlet that carves the Keeler Gap, raising kilometre-high waves in the ring edges that cast…
• DeeDee — “Distant Dwarf” — a faint, far-flung world so remote its light takes over twelve hours to reach us.
• Deimos — Mars’s tiny outer moon — from the surface it would look like a bright, slow star.
• Despina — A dark, irregular moon about 150 km across, found in Voyager 2 images weeks before the 1989 flyby.
• Didymos — The larger member of the asteroid pair visited by DART. This model preserves the mission’s reconstructed…
• Dimorphos — The small asteroid moon struck by NASA’s DART spacecraft. Its detailed mesh is reconstructed from images…
• Dinkinesh — Lucy’s first asteroid turned out to have a moon — and the moon, Selam, turned out to be two lobes touching.
• Dione — Bright ice cliffs streak its face where the crust fractured long ago.
• Donaldjohanson — Lucy’s second flyby target turned out bigger and stranger than expected: an elongated, two-lobed body about…
• Earth — Home. Here, we learned to make fire, tell stories and give the stars names. Along its rivers we built…
• Enceladus — The brightest world in the solar system, venting its buried ocean into space — Cassini flew through the…
• Encke — The second comet ever found to return, after Halley’s, and the quickest of the famous ones: it laps the Sun…
• Epimetheus — Half of the solar system’s only co-orbital pair: every four years Epimetheus and Janus close in on each…
• Eris — The discovery that demoted Pluto. Slightly smaller but more massive than Pluto, this frozen world wrapped in…
• Eros — The first asteroid ever orbited and landed on. NEAR Shoemaker touched down on this peanut-shaped world in…
• Europa — Beneath a cracked shell of ice lies twice as much liquid water as all Earth’s oceans — one of the most…
• Eurybates — The largest piece of an ancient collision in Jupiter’s leading Trojan swarm. NASA’s Lucy spacecraft flies…
• Galatea — Galatea orbits about 1,000 km inside the Adams ring. That ring holds bright clumps of material called arcs…
• Ganymede — A planet in all but name: bigger than Mercury, with its own magnetic field and a buried ocean of its own.
• Gaspra — The first asteroid ever seen up close. Galileo flew past this stony, angular fragment in 1991 on its way to…
• Gǃkúnǁʼhòmdímà — A very red scattered-disc body named from Juǀʼhoan folklore, circled by its small dark moon.
• Goibniu — A mid-sized classical Kuiper Belt object on a gently inclined, near-circular orbit.
• Gonggong — One of the reddest large bodies known, slathered in tholins and possibly old water-ice frost.
• Hale–Bopp — The Great Comet of 1997, probably the most widely seen comet of the 20th century. It stayed visible to the…
• Halimede — A small grey moon looping backwards around Neptune every 5.1 years, about 17 million km out on average.
• Halley — The comet that proved comets return. Recorded since 240 BC, painted into the Bayeux Tapestry, and waiting…
• 103P/Hartley 2 — A hyperactive little peanut of a comet: EPOXI flew past in 2010 and found it spitting golf-ball-sized…
• Haumea — The fastest-spinning large body in the solar system. Whirling once every four hours, it has been stretched…
• Helene — Dione’s leading trojan, its surface streaked by flows of ultra-fine dust that behave almost like a liquid in…
• Himalia — The largest of Jupiter’s far-flung irregular moons, probably a captured asteroid. It loops around Jupiter…
• Hippocamp — Too faint for Voyager 2 to spot, Hippocamp turned up in 2013 in Hubble images taken years earlier.
• Hydra — Pluto’s outermost known moon is a bright, irregular chunk of nearly pure water ice about 50 km long.
• Hygiea — A dark, carbon-rich world big enough to have pulled itself almost round. VLT images in 2019 found it nearly…
• Hyperion — The sponge moon: so porous that impacts punch in rather than splash out, and tumbling so chaotically that no…
• Iapetus — The yin-yang moon: one side black as soot, the other white as snow, with a mountain ridge circling its…
• Ida — A cratered, 60-km-long potato that gave us the first confirmed asteroid moon: images from Galileo’s 1993…
• Io — A world being kneaded alive: Jupiter’s gravity pumps so much heat into Io that it constantly turns itself…
• Itokawa — The sea-otter-shaped rubble pile that gave humanity its first asteroid sample, returned by Japan’s Hayabusa…
• Ixion — A reddish plutino that briefly held the title of largest known Kuiper Belt object after Pluto.
• Janus — The larger of the co-orbital twins, waltzing with Epimetheus in a gravitational do-si-do that has repeated…
• Jupiter — More massive than every other planet combined. Its Great Red Spot is a storm wider than Earth that has raged…
• Kamoʻoalewa — Earth’s quasi-satellite: a tiny asteroid that orbits the Sun in step with us, seeming to loop around Earth…
• Kerberos — A tiny double-lobed moon, probably two pieces stuck together. It was expected to be dark, but the 2015 New…
• Kleopatra — An elongated asteroid with two known moons. The displayed body is a historical radar reconstruction from the…
• Laomedeia — A faint moon about 23 million km from Neptune, taking almost 9 years per lap on a tilted, stretched orbit.
• Larissa — A dark, cratered relic of Neptune’s original moons, shattered and reassembled after Triton’s violent arrival.
• Leucus — A dark Trojan asteroid that turns only once every 18½ days, one of the slowest spinners known.
• Lutetia — Rosetta flew past this large, irregular asteroid in July 2010. This is the archived shape reconstructed from…
• Makemake — A reddish, methane-frosted world named for the creator god of the Rapa Nui. The second-brightest Kuiper Belt…
• Máni — A large, solitary Kuiper Belt world — among the biggest known to have no moon of its own.
• Mars — A cold desert world with the solar system’s tallest volcano and a canyon that would stretch across the…
• Mathilde — A coal-dark rubble pile scarred by giant craters up to 33 km wide. NEAR Shoemaker flew past in 1997 and…
• Mercury — The smallest planet and the fastest, skimming the Sun at 47 km/s. With almost no atmosphere to hold heat…
• Metis — Jupiter’s innermost moon whips around in about seven hours — faster than Jupiter itself spins — skimming the…
• Mimas — The Death Star moon — the impact that dug Herschel crater nearly shattered it.
• Miranda — A patchwork world that looks shattered and reassembled, home to the tallest cliff in the solar system.
• Moon — Born from a planet-sized impact 4.5 billion years ago, the Moon stabilizes Earth’s tilt and raises its tides.
• Naiad — Neptune’s innermost moon laps the planet in about seven hours, faster than Neptune spins, so tides are…
• NEOWISE — The bright comet of summer 2020, its twin tails visible to the naked eye even from city outskirts.
• Neptune — The first planet found by mathematics before telescopes — its gravity’s tug on Uranus gave it away.
• Nereid — Neptune’s outlier swings from 1.4 to 9.6 million km out on one of the most eccentric orbits of any known…
• Neso — Neso wanders farther from its planet than almost any other known moon: so far that one backwards lap takes…
• Nix — A small, bright, elongated moon that circles Pluto and Charon together rather than Pluto alone.
• Oberon — The outermost of the classical Uranian moons, scarred and still.
• Orcus — Nicknamed the anti-Pluto: it shares Pluto’s exact 2:3 dance with Neptune but always sits on the opposite…
• Orus — A large, dark Trojan named after a Greek warrior of the Iliad, sharing Jupiter’s orbit about 60° ahead of…
• ʻOumuamua — The first known visitor from another star system, spotted in 2017 as it raced away from the Sun.
• Pallas — The second asteroid ever found, on an orbit tilted so steeply that no spacecraft has visited it.
• Pan — The innermost shepherd moon, sweeping the Encke Gap clear as it goes. Ring dust piled onto its equator gives…
• Pandora — The F ring’s outer guardian, herding the narrow ring from outside while Prometheus works the inner edge.
• Patroclus — Two near-twin worlds locked in orbit around each other, trailing Jupiter in its Trojan swarm.
• Phaethon — A “rock comet” that swoops far inside Mercury’s orbit, where the Sun bakes it hot enough to crack rock.
• Phobos — A captured lump of rubble racing around Mars three times a day, so low that Mars’s tides are slowly reeling…
• Phoebe — Saturn’s outcast: a captured Kuiper Belt body circling backwards far beyond the regular moons, shedding the…
• Pluto — A world of nitrogen glaciers and water-ice mountains, with a heart-shaped plain photographed by New Horizons…
• Polymele — The smallest of Lucy’s Trojan targets, about 21 km across. Astronomers watching it pass in front of a star…
• Pons–Brooks — A periodic comet famous for its outbursts: in 2023 one gave its coma a horned shape, earning it the nickname…
• Prometheus — The F ring’s inner shepherd — a potato-shaped moon that dips into the ring each orbit, dragging out dark…
• Proteus — Bigger than Mimas yet still a lump: Proteus sits right at the size where gravity almost — but not quite…
• Psamathe — One of the most distant moons of any planet, Psamathe takes about 25 years to circle Neptune — backwards…
• Puck — Voyager 2 found Puck weeks before its 1986 flyby and took the only close-up: a dark, roughly round, cratered…
• 2005 QU182 — A bright, icy scattered-disc object on a wildly eccentric orbit that swings deep into the outer dark.
• Quaoar — A Kuiper Belt world circled by a ring so far out that the debris should have coalesced into a moon — but…
• Rhea — A quiet, heavily cratered ice world — possibly with the only ring system ever suspected around a moon.
• Ritona — A reddish classical KBO out beyond Neptune, one of many siblings on quiet, near-circular paths.
• Rumina — A scattered-disc object on a long, stretched orbit reaching far beyond the classical Kuiper Belt.
• Ryugu — A dark, spinning-top asteroid sampled by Hayabusa2. Its terrain comes from the mission’s reconstructed…
• S/2002 N5 — First glimpsed in 2002 but lost before its orbit could be pinned down, this moon was found again in 2021 and…
• S/2021 N1 — One of the faintest moons ever found from the ground: confirming it took long, stacked exposures on three of…
• Salacia — A dim, dark world named for the Roman goddess of the sea. Its low reflectivity and density make it a…
• Sao — Sao takes about 8 years to circle Neptune, some 22 million km out, on an orbit tilted about 50 degrees.
• Saturn — The rings are mostly water ice — 280,000 km across yet often just 10 meters thick. Saturn is the least dense…
• Sedna — One of the most distant known worlds, on an orbit so vast a single year lasts over eleven millennia.
• Šteins — A small asteroid encountered by Rosetta in September 2008. Explore the mission-derived shape with its large…
• Styx — The smallest known moon of Pluto, a sliver of ice about 16 km long found by Hubble while scouting for…
• Sun — A middle-aged yellow dwarf holding 99.86% of the solar system’s mass. Light leaving its surface now took…
• Swift–Tuttle — The parent of the Perseid meteor shower: every August, Earth ploughs through the dust it has shed.
• Telesto — A smooth, dust-mantled moonlet camped in the Lagrange point ahead of Tethys — one of only four trojan moons…
• 9P/Tempel 1 — The first comet humanity ever punched: NASA’s Deep Impact slammed a copper slug into it on 4 July 2005 to…
• Tethys — An icy ball split nearly pole-to-pole by a vast canyon.
• Thalassa — A small, oddly flat moon circling between two of Neptune’s faint rings. Naiad shares its neighbourhood, but…
• Thebe — A battered inner moon whose knocked-off dust forms one of Jupiter’s faint gossamer rings.
• Titan — The only moon with a thick atmosphere and the only world beyond Earth with liquid on its surface — rivers…
• Titania — Largest of the five — canyons longer than the Grand Canyon cut its icy shell.
• Toutatis — A tumbling, irregular near-Earth asteroid. The displayed model is reconstructed from radar echoes and uses a…
• Triton — Neptune’s stolen moon: a captured Kuiper Belt object orbiting backwards, with nitrogen geysers erupting…
• Tsuchinshan–ATLAS — The great comet of October 2024, which blazed low in the evening twilight with a striking anti-tail.
• Umbriel — A dark, ancient ball with one mysterious bright ring — the “fluorescent cheerio” of Wunda crater.
• Uni — A Kuiper Belt riddle: it and its moon are so under-dense they appear to be mostly porous ice and rubble.
• Uranus — Knocked onto its side by an ancient collision, Uranus rolls around the Sun with its poles where its equator…
• Varda — A classical Kuiper Belt world named for a Tolkien deity, orbited by its moon Ilmarë.
• Varuna — A fast-spinning Kuiper Belt object whirling so quickly it has been stretched into an elongated ellipsoid.
• Venus — Earth’s evil twin: nearly the same size, wrapped in a crushing CO₂ atmosphere with sulfuric-acid clouds.
• Vesta — The brightest asteroid in our sky and nearly a protoplanet: it has an iron core, a basaltic crust, and a…
• 81P/Wild 2 — The comet we brought home: Stardust flew through its coma in 2004, caught the dust in aerogel, and…

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