Lekti sa a te ekri pa yon Local Solar System Li se yon manm ekip Fondasyon an epi li ka amelyore pa yon revizè ki kalifye. Èske w gen konesans sou sijè sa a? Suggere un changement
Escale
Ouverture pageTout bagay la se nan eskalye reyèl: gwosè ak distans yo nan menm proporsyon. Chak piksèl ou deplase a pote w 3,000 km.
Tout foto ou te wè nan sistèm solè a te fè sa ki pa t 'nan li.
Mercury is ahead, where sunlight is almost seven times stronger than on Earth.
Toujou pa gen anyen. Ou te pase 16.8 million km depi Mercury.
The sunlight passing you now left the Sun 5 min 5 sec ago.
Li pi devan. Gade ki jan ti kay la ye.
Mars se toujou 58.8 million km devan.
Yon mesaj radyo soti sou tè a pran ant 3 ak 22 minit pou rive sou Mars, depann de kote planèt yo ye.
Ou ka aligne 4,611 tè bò kote yo nan espas la ou te travèse depi Tè.
Ou se 14% nan wout la soti nan Mars a Ceresstar name.
Toujou pa gen anyen. Ou te pase 53.1 million km depi Mars.
The sunlight passing you now left the Sun 17 min 6 sec ago.
Ceresstar name se toujou 79.6 million km devan.
Ou nan zòn ki rele "Belt of asteroids" la. Èske ou te frape nenpòt bagay? Nan mwayèn, asteroyid yo separe pa yon milyon kilomèt.
Ou ka aligne 12,497 tè bò kote yo nan espas la ou te travèse depi Mars.
Ou se 17% nan wout la soti nan Ceresstar name a Jupiter.
Toujou pa gen anyen. Ou te pase 122 million km depi Ceresstar name.
The sunlight passing you now left the Sun 33 min 8 sec ago.
Jupiter se toujou 122 million km devan.
Ou ka aligne 23,846 tè bò kote yo nan espas la ou te travèse depi Ceresstar name.
Ou se 10% nan wout la soti nan Jupiter a Saturn.
Toujou pa gen anyen. Ou te pase 130 million km depi Jupiter.
The sunlight passing you now left the Sun 54 min 5 sec ago.
Saturn se toujou 389 million km devan.
Voyager 1 te pran apeprè 20 mwa pou li rive soti nan Joupiter nan Saturn.
Ou ka aligne 30,529 tè bò kote yo nan espas la ou te travèse depi Jupiter.
Ou se 70% nan wout la soti nan Jupiter a Saturn.
Toujou pa gen anyen. Ou te pase 519 million km depi Jupiter.
The sunlight passing you now left the Sun 1 hr 16 min ago.
Uranus se toujou 1.31 billion km devan.
Ou ka aligne 20,605 tè bò kote yo nan espas la ou te travèse depi Saturn.
Ou se 27% nan wout la soti nan Saturn a Uranus.
Toujou pa gen anyen. Ou te pase 525 million km depi Saturn.
Uranus orbite de fwa pi lwen soti nan solèy la pase Saturn. Pi lwen ou ale, pi vid li vin.
The sunlight passing you now left the Sun 2 hr 3 min ago.
Uranus se toujou 525 million km devan.
Ou ka aligne 82,418 tè bò kote yo nan espas la ou te travèse depi Saturn.
Ou se 82% nan wout la soti nan Saturn a Uranus.
Toujou pa gen anyen. Ou te pase 1.31 billion km depi Saturn.
The sunlight passing you now left the Sun 2 hr 48 min ago.
Neptune se toujou 1.33 billion km devan.
Ou ka aligne 34,840 tè bò kote yo nan espas la ou te travèse depi Uranus.
Ou se 36% nan wout la soti nan Uranus a Neptune.
Toujou pa gen anyen. Ou te pase 740 million km depi Uranus.
Voyager 2 te pran apeprè twa ane ak yon mwatye pou li pase nan espas sa a, soti nan Uran nan 1986 jiska Neptunus an 1989.
The sunlight passing you now left the Sun 3 hr 37 min ago.
Neptune se toujou 444 million km devan.
Ou ka aligne 104,519 tè bò kote yo nan espas la ou te travèse depi Uranus.
Ou se 91% nan wout la soti nan Uranus a Neptune.
Toujou pa gen anyen. Ou te pase 129 million km depi Neptune.
The sunlight passing you now left the Sun 4 hr 24 min ago.
Yon lòt gwoup nan planèt ki gen yon orbit ki pi lwen pase Pluton yo rele "Belt la Kuiper": sa a se yon anèl de mond ki gen glacé, ki te pwolonje konsa ke apre Pluto, New Horizons te vole prèske sèlman youn nan yo.
Pluto se toujou 906 million km devan.
Ou ka aligne 50,798 tè bò kote yo nan espas la ou te travèse depi Neptune.
Ou se 55% nan wout la soti nan Neptune a Pluto.
Toujou pa gen anyen. Ou te pase 906 million km depi Neptune.
New Horizons, one of the fastest spacecraft ever launched, took nine and a half years to reach Pluto. Sunlight gets to Pluto's average distance in about five and a half hours.
The sunlight passing you now left the Sun 5 hr 15 min ago.
Pluto se toujou 129 million km devan.
Defile anba a nan kadran an pou vole deyò, oswa kòmanse pilot oto anba a.
Fin Vwayaj
Gade dèyè. Estre a briyan se solèy la.
Tablè done (altènatif tèks)
| Mondyal | Diamèt | Distans soti nan solèy la | Tan limyè- vwayaje soti nan solèy la | px |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mercury | 4,879 km | 0.387 au | 3 min 13 sec | 19,303 |
| Venis | 12,104 km | 0.723 au | 6 min 1 sec | 36,070 |
| Tè | 12,742 km | 1 au | 8 min 19 sec | 49,866 |
| Mars | 6,779 km | 1.52 au | 12 min 40 sec | 75,981 |
| Ceresstar name | 939 km | 2.77 au | 23 min 0 sec | 137,907 |
| Jupiter | 139,822 km | 5.2 au | 43 min 16 sec | 259,447 |
| Saturn | 116,464 km | 9.54 au | 1 hr 19 min | 475,555 |
| Uranus | 50,724 km | 19.2 au | 2 hr 40 min | 956,886 |
| Neptune | 49,244 km | 30.1 au | 4 hr 10 min | 1,499,465 |
| Pluto | 2,377 km | 39.6 au | 5 hr 29 min | 1,974,125 |
Almost every picture of the solar system lies. To fit on a page, the planets are squeezed together and blown up in size. Walk it at true scale and you discover the real star of the show: empty space.
The solar system is mostly empty space, and that emptiness is the whole story.
Look
Most pictures of the solar system squeeze the planets together like beads on a string, and draw them far too big. They have to: at true scale, a page would be almost completely empty.
Guess first: if the Sun were a beach ball, how far away would Earth be? A step? A room? A street?
A street. With the Sun as a 1-metre ball, Earth is a 9 mm pea about 107 metres away: roughly the length of a football pitch. Keep that picture in mind as you travel.
The Scale Walk above is drawn at true scale: sizes and distances in the same proportion. Every pixel you scroll carries you 3,000 km. Scroll inside the frame, press Next world, or tap a planet on the journey map at the top.
- The journey map is to scale too. The white marker is you. Notice how the Sun and the four inner planets crowd together at the far left.
- The odometer counts kilometres and the time sunlight has needed to get where you are.
- When you stop near a world, the camera locks on and leans in (the zoom is shown next to the scale bar), and a card tells you where you are.
- Earth, a globe 12,742 km across, is almost 50,000 scrolled pixels from the Sun. Neptune is about 1.5 million pixels away.
Notice how much of the trip is just black, with only a few lines of narration drifting past. That is the real solar system: tiny worlds separated by enormous emptiness.
Understand
A scale model divides every length by the same number. Here the number is 3,000: 3,000 km of real space becomes 1 pixel.
| World | Real diameter | Diameter at 1 px = 3,000 km | Distance from Sun | At this scale |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sun | 1,391,400 km | 464 px | 0 | 0 |
| Earth | 12,742 km | 4 px | 149.6 million km | 49,866 px |
| Jupiter | 139,822 km | 47 px | 778.3 million km | 259,437 px |
| Neptune | 49,244 km | 16 px | 4,498 million km | 1,499,000 px |
A handy comparison uses the Sun as a 1-metre ball. Divide everything by the Sun’s diameter (1.39 million km):
- Earth is a 9 mm pea, 107 m away.
- Jupiter is a 10 cm grapefruit, 560 m away.
- Neptune is a 3.5 cm marble, 3.2 km away.
- The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, would be another ball about 29,000 km away: more than two thirds of the way around the real Earth.
Try the autopilot at 1×, the real speed of light. You move 100 pixels per second, which feels slow on screen. Real sunlight really does need 8 minutes to reach Earth and more than 4 hours to reach Neptune. The faster settings compress time, not distance: the autopilot still brakes and pauses at every world.
Guess first: scrolling with a mouse wheel, are you moving faster or slower than light?
Much faster. A brisk scroll carries you millions of kilometres per second, often ten or more times the speed of light; the speed readout under the odometer shows it. Even so, the outer planets take a long time to reach. That is how big the distances are.
Master
Two separate compressions distort normal diagrams: the size scale and the distance scale. The ratio of the Sun-Neptune distance (4.5 × 10⁹ km) to Earth’s diameter (1.27 × 10⁴ km) is about 350,000. A screen 1,000 pixels tall can resolve a range of about 1,000, so no single static image can show both the planets and their spacing. Interactive zoom, logarithmic axes or a scroll-length model like this one are the only honest options.
This is also why the orrery on this site offers two modes. Readable scale compresses distance with a square root (r_screen ∝ √r) and draws planets at fixed legible sizes. True scale is linear in both size and distance, so the planets shrink to sub-pixel dots.
The emptiness has consequences for spaceflight. Travelling between planets is not like driving between cities: the planets move, the distances are huge, and the energy cost depends far more on changes of speed than on distance. That idea, delta-v, is at the heart of the Navigator path.
A last scale fact: the asteroid belt, often drawn as a crowded field of rocks, is so sparse that spacecraft cross it without any special manoeuvres. The Kuiper belt beyond Neptune is emptier still.
Tcheke li
Set the autopilot speed to 1× and press 'Travel at the speed of light'. Watch the light-time clock as you reach Earth: about 8 minutes 20 seconds. Before you look at the table, guess how long the same trip takes to Neptune, then check.
Great. Chalè yo se kote lekòl la ranje.
Konplo rapid
3 kesyon rapid. Chwazi yon repons pou wè si ou gen dwa.
-
If the Sun were a ball 1 metre wide, about how big would Earth be?
- A A football
- B A grapefruit
- C About 9 millimetres, like a pea
- D About 1 millimetre
Montre repons lan
C. About 9 millimetres, like a pea The Sun is about 109 times wider than Earth, so 1 m ÷ 109 ≈ 9 mm.
-
At that same scale, how far away would Earth be from the 1-metre Sun?
- A About 1 metre
- B About 10 metres
- C About 107 metres
- D About 1 kilometre
Montre repons lan
C. About 107 metres 1 au is about 107.5 Sun diameters, so Earth would be a pea about the length of a football pitch away.
-
Why do most drawings of the solar system show the planets close together?
- A Because they really are close
- B Because at true scale the planets would be too small to see on the page
- C Because the drawings show the planets at their closest approach
- D Because of light pollution
Montre repons lan
B. Because at true scale the planets would be too small to see on the page
Finish line
- Jwe ak interaktif
- Li leson an
- Te fè defi a
- Te pran tès la
Mark the lesson complete to save it to your progress on this device.
Leson an fini. Bon travay!
Up next Days and years on each worldMo nan leson sa a
Fon
- NASA NSSDCA Planetary Fact Sheet (diameters, distances)
- JPL SSD: Approximate Positions of the Planets (semi-major axes)
- NASA NSSDCA: Schoolyard Solar System scale model
Lekti sa a gen lisans CC BY-SA 4.0.