A walk from the Sun to Neptune

Ń fi àwọn ìṣàmúlò-ètò pamọ́. Àkọlé yìí tí a kọ̀ nípa ìrànwọ́ AÌ láti jẹ́ pé kò tí a ṣàyẹwo láti inú àwọn ìṣàmúlò-ètò tó lè gbá. Are you qualified in this subject? Suggest an edit

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Ṣí ojú-ìwé ìtàn

Everything here is at true scale: sizes and distances in the same proportion. Each pixel you scroll carries you 3,000 km.

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Mercury 4,879 km · 0.387 au · 3 ìṣ 13 ìṣ àáy

Venus 12,104 km · 0.723 au · 6 ìṣ 1 ìṣ àáy

Àwọn Ìṣàmúlò-ètò 12,742 km · 1 au · 8 ìṣ 19 ìṣ àáy

Àwọn àyọkà ìṣàfarawégbè 6,779 km · 1.52 au · 12 ìṣ 40 ìṣ àáy

Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́ 939 km · 2.77 au · 23 ìṣ 0 ìṣ àáy

Jupiter 139,822 km · 5.2 au · 43 ìṣ 16 ìṣ àáy

Sáà 116,464 km · 9.54 au · 1 wkt 19 ìṣ

Uranus 50,724 km · 19.2 au · 2 wkt 40 ìṣ

Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́ 49,244 km · 30.1 au · 4 wkt 10 ìṣ

Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́ 2,377 km · 39.6 au · 5 wkt 29 ìṣ

Keep scrolling. Every picture you have seen of the solar system squeezed this emptiness out.

Mercury is ahead, where sunlight is almost seven times stronger than on Earth.

Still nothing. You have crossed 16.8 mílíọ̀nù km since Mercury.

The sunlight passing you now left the Sun 5 ìṣ 5 ìṣ àáy ago.

Earth is ahead. Watch how small home turns out to be.

Àwọn àyọkà ìṣàfarawégbè is still 58.8 mílíọ̀nù km ahead.

A radio message from Earth takes between 3 and 22 minutes to reach Mars, depending on where the two planets are.

You could line up 4,611 Earths side by side in the space you have crossed since Àwọn Ìṣàmúlò-ètò.

You are 14% of the way from Àwọn àyọkà ìṣàfarawégbè to Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́.

Still nothing. You have crossed 53.1 mílíọ̀nù km since Àwọn àyọkà ìṣàfarawégbè.

The sunlight passing you now left the Sun 17 ìṣ 6 ìṣ àáy ago.

Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́ is still 79.6 mílíọ̀nù km ahead.

You are inside the asteroid belt. Did you hit anything? On average the asteroids are about a million kilometres apart.

You could line up 12,497 Earths side by side in the space you have crossed since Àwọn àyọkà ìṣàfarawégbè.

You are 17% of the way from Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́ to Jupiter.

Still nothing. You have crossed 122 mílíọ̀nù km since Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́.

The sunlight passing you now left the Sun 33 ìṣ 8 ìṣ àáy ago.

Jupiter is still 122 mílíọ̀nù km ahead.

You could line up 23,846 Earths side by side in the space you have crossed since Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́.

You are 10% of the way from Jupiter to Sáà.

Still nothing. You have crossed 130 mílíọ̀nù km since Jupiter.

The sunlight passing you now left the Sun 54 ìṣ 5 ìṣ àáy ago.

Sáà is still 389 mílíọ̀nù km ahead.

Voyager 1 took about 20 months to fly from Jupiter to Saturn.

You could line up 30,529 Earths side by side in the space you have crossed since Jupiter.

You are 70% of the way from Jupiter to Sáà.

Still nothing. You have crossed 519 mílíọ̀nù km since Jupiter.

The sunlight passing you now left the Sun 1 wkt 16 ìṣ ago.

Uranus is still 1.31 bilíọ̀nù km ahead.

You could line up 20,605 Earths side by side in the space you have crossed since Sáà.

You are 27% of the way from Sáà to Uranus.

Still nothing. You have crossed 525 mílíọ̀nù km since Sáà.

Uranus orbits twice as far from the Sun as Saturn. The farther out you go, the emptier it gets.

The sunlight passing you now left the Sun 2 wkt 3 ìṣ ago.

Uranus is still 525 mílíọ̀nù km ahead.

You could line up 82,418 Earths side by side in the space you have crossed since Sáà.

You are 82% of the way from Sáà to Uranus.

Still nothing. You have crossed 1.31 bilíọ̀nù km since Sáà.

The sunlight passing you now left the Sun 2 wkt 48 ìṣ ago.

Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́ is still 1.33 bilíọ̀nù km ahead.

You could line up 34,840 Earths side by side in the space you have crossed since Uranus.

You are 36% of the way from Uranus to Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́.

Still nothing. You have crossed 740 mílíọ̀nù km since Uranus.

Voyager 2 needed about three and a half years to cross this gap, from Uranus in 1986 to Neptune in 1989.

The sunlight passing you now left the Sun 3 wkt 37 ìṣ ago.

Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́ is still 444 mílíọ̀nù km ahead.

You could line up 104,519 Earths side by side in the space you have crossed since Uranus.

You are 91% of the way from Uranus to Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́.

Still nothing. You have crossed 129 mílíọ̀nù km since Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́.

The sunlight passing you now left the Sun 4 wkt 24 ìṣ ago.

The Kuiper belt: a ring of icy worlds so spread out that after Pluto, New Horizons flew close to just one of them.

Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́ is still 906 mílíọ̀nù km ahead.

You could line up 50,798 Earths side by side in the space you have crossed since Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́.

You are 55% of the way from Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́ to Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́.

Still nothing. You have crossed 906 mílíọ̀nù km since Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́.

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 wkt 15 ìṣ ago.

Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́ is still 129 mílíọ̀nù km ahead.

0 km 0 au · Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́ 0 s

Autopilot speed

Àtòjọ-ẹ̀yàn ààyè-iṣẹ́ (ọ̀fẹ́ ìṣàfarawé kọ́kọ́)

Àwọn Ìṣàmúlò-ètò	Ìṣàmúlò-ètò	Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́	Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́	px
Mercury	4,879 km	0.387 au	3 ìṣ 13 ìṣ àáy	19,303
Venus	12,104 km	0.723 au	6 ìṣ 1 ìṣ àáy	36,070
Àwọn Ìṣàmúlò-ètò	12,742 km	1 au	8 ìṣ 19 ìṣ àáy	49,866
Àwọn àyọkà ìṣàfarawégbè	6,779 km	1.52 au	12 ìṣ 40 ìṣ àáy	75,981
Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́	939 km	2.77 au	23 ìṣ 0 ìṣ àáy	137,907
Jupiter	139,822 km	5.2 au	43 ìṣ 16 ìṣ àáy	259,447
Sáà	116,464 km	9.54 au	1 wkt 19 ìṣ	475,555
Uranus	50,724 km	19.2 au	2 wkt 40 ìṣ	956,886
Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́	49,244 km	30.1 au	4 wkt 10 ìṣ	1,499,465
Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́	2,377 km	39.6 au	5 wkt 29 ìṣ	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.

A thin crescent of Neptune against black space. — Neptune, the farthest planet, seen by Voyager 2 as it left for interstellar space. Credit: NASA/JPL

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.

Wá

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.

Àwọn ààyè-iṣẹ́ ìsàlẹ̀-ilà

3 quick questions. Pick an answer to see if you are right.

If the Sun were a ball 1 metre wide, about how big would Earth be?
1. A A football
2. B A grapefruit
3. C About 9 millimetres, like a pea
4. D About 1 millimetre
Show the answer
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?
1. A About 1 metre
2. B About 10 metres
3. C About 107 metres
4. D About 1 kilometre
Show the answer
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?
1. A Because they really are close
2. B Because at true scale the planets would be too small to see on the page
3. C Because the drawings show the planets at their closest approach
4. D Because of light pollution
Show the answer
B. Because at true scale the planets would be too small to see on the page

Finish line

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Took the quiz

Mark the lesson complete to save it to your progress on this device.

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