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 80 objects

• 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.
• Amalthea — A deep-red lump skimming just above Jupiter’s cloud tops, dyed by sulfur blasted off Io and stretched by…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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.
• 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.
• Dione — Bright ice cliffs streak its face where the crust fractured long ago.
• Earth — The only known world with liquid-water oceans at its surface — and the only one known to harbor life.
• Enceladus — The brightest world in the solar system, venting its buried ocean into space — Cassini flew through the…
• 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…
• Ganymede — A planet in all but name: bigger than Mercury, with its own magnetic field and a buried ocean of its own.
• 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.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Larissa — A dark, cratered relic of Neptune’s original moons, shattered and reassembled after Triton’s violent arrival.
• 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…
• Mercury — The smallest planet and the fastest, skimming the Sun at 47 km/s. With almost no atmosphere to hold heat…
• 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.
• Neptune — The first planet found by mathematics before telescopes — its gravity’s tug on Uranus gave it away.
• 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…
• 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.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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.
• Salacia — A dim, dark world named for the Roman goddess of the sea. Its low reflectivity and density make it a…
• 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.
• Sun — A middle-aged yellow dwarf holding 99.86% of the solar system’s mass. Light leaving its surface now took…
• 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.
• 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.
• Triton — Neptune’s stolen moon: a captured Kuiper Belt object orbiting backwards, with nitrogen geysers erupting…
• 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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