Eight planets. One star. 4.6 billion years of formation. The solar system is almost incomprehensibly large — if Earth were a marble, the Sun would be a basketball 26 metres away. Explore it all in real-time 3D.
The solar system formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago from a collapsing cloud of gas and dust. The vast majority of the material — 99.86% of all the mass — coalesced into the Sun. The remaining fraction formed the planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and dust that orbit it today. What you see in the simulation above is not an artist's impression — it is a mathematically accurate model of the orbital mechanics that govern every object in the system.
The simulation above — which you are already watching behind this text — runs in real time, driven by the same Keplerian orbital equations that NASA uses to calculate spacecraft trajectories. Every orbit period, every inclination, every relative size is calibrated to the actual IAU (International Astronomical Union) data. Drag to rotate. Scroll to zoom. Click any planet to see its data.
THE EIGHT PLANETS — DATA AT A GLANCE
PLANET
TYPE
DISTANCE FROM SUN
ORBITAL PERIOD
DIAMETER VS EARTH
MERCURY
ROCKY
57.9M km
88 days
0.38×
VENUS
ROCKY
108.2M km
225 days
0.95×
EARTH
ROCKY
149.6M km
365.25 days
1.00× (baseline)
MARS
ROCKY
227.9M km
687 days
0.53×
JUPITER
GAS GIANT
778.5M km
11.9 years
11.2×
SATURN
GAS GIANT
1,432M km
29.5 years
9.45×
URANUS
ICE GIANT
2,867M km
84 years
4.01×
NEPTUNE
ICE GIANT
4,515M km
165 years
3.88×
THE PROBLEM OF SCALE
No textbook diagram has ever shown the solar system to true scale — because if they did, the planets would be invisible specks on a page. The vast majority of the solar system is empty space. If you drew the Sun as a circle 30 cm in diameter, Neptune's orbit would be 3.2 kilometres away. Earth would be 2.6 mm across, located 32 metres from the Sun.
This is why almost every solar system illustration you have ever seen is misleading — planets are shown millions of times larger relative to their orbital distances than they actually are. Pandita Data's 3D Solar System simulation uses a compressed but proportional scale that lets you appreciate the relative sizes of the planets while keeping the system navigable.
PLANET SIZE COMPARISON
☀️ SUN
1,392,000 km
🪐 JUPITER
139,820 km
🪐 SATURN
116,460 km
🔵 URANUS
50,724 km
🔵 NEPTUNE
49,244 km
🌍 EARTH
12,742 km
🔴 MARS
6,779 km
⚪ MERCURY
4,879 km
ONE EXTRAORDINARY FACT PER PLANET
☿ MEX
MERCURY — A DAY LONGER THAN A YEAR
Mercury rotates so slowly that one Mercurian day (176 Earth days) is actually longer than one Mercurian year (88 Earth days). It completes two full orbits of the Sun for every three rotations on its axis — a 3:2 orbital resonance locked in by the Sun's tidal forces billions of years ago.
♀ VEN
VENUS — HOTTER THAN MERCURY, SPINS BACKWARDS
Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system (462°C surface average) despite being further from the Sun than Mercury — its dense CO₂ atmosphere creates a runaway greenhouse effect. It also rotates backwards relative to most planets, and so slowly that a Venusian day is longer than a Venusian year.
🌍 EAR
EARTH — THE ONLY PLANET NOT NAMED AFTER A GOD
Earth is the densest planet in the solar system and the only one confirmed to have plate tectonics, a large stabilising moon, and liquid surface water — all of which may be prerequisites for complex life. It has been geologically active for its entire 4.5-billion-year history.
♂ MAR
MARS — HOME OF THE TALLEST VOLCANO IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM
Olympus Mons on Mars stands 21.9 km above the surrounding plains — nearly three times the height of Mount Everest above sea level, and so wide (600 km across) that you could not see its edge from its summit due to the curvature of the planet. Mars has no plate tectonics, so volcanic material piled up in one spot for billions of years.
♃ JUP
JUPITER — ITS GREAT RED SPOT IS A 400-YEAR-OLD STORM
The Great Red Spot is an anticyclonic storm that has been continuously observed since 1665. At its largest it was three times the diameter of Earth. It has been shrinking — currently about 1.3 Earth diameters across — and scientists debate whether it will eventually dissipate. Jupiter's magnetic field is 20,000 times stronger than Earth's.
♄ SAT
SATURN — ITS RINGS ARE ONLY 10–100 METRES THICK
Saturn's rings span up to 282,000 km from the planet — wide enough to fit 22 Earths side by side — yet they are only 10 to 100 metres thick on average. They are made almost entirely of water ice fragments ranging from dust grains to house-sized chunks. The rings are geologically young — perhaps only 100 million years old — and are slowly disappearing.
⛢ URA
URANUS — ROTATES ON ITS SIDE
Uranus has an axial tilt of 97.77° — meaning it essentially rolls around the Sun on its side. Its poles spend 42 years in continuous sunlight followed by 42 years of darkness. The leading theory: a proto-planet collision billions of years ago knocked it onto its side. It also has rings, discovered only in 1977.
♆ NEP
NEPTUNE — PREDICTED MATHEMATICALLY BEFORE IT WAS SEEN
Neptune was the first planet discovered through mathematical prediction rather than direct observation. In 1846, Urbain Le Verrier calculated its position from perturbations in Uranus's orbit — and astronomers found it within 1° of his prediction. It has the fastest measured winds in the solar system: over 2,100 km/h.
HOW THE SIMULATION WORKS
Pandita Data's 3D Solar System is built on Three.js with Keplerian orbital mechanics computed in real time on the client's GPU. Each planet's position is calculated from its six orbital elements — semi-major axis, eccentricity, inclination, longitude of ascending node, argument of perihelion, and mean anomaly at epoch — sourced directly from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory planetary fact sheets.
🔭
KEPLERIAN MECHANICS
Each planet's orbit is computed using the six Keplerian elements updated to current epoch. The simulation solves Kepler's equation iteratively to determine the true anomaly — the actual angular position along the elliptical orbit — at any given moment in time.
▸ NASA JPL PLANETARY ELEMENTS · J2000 EPOCH
⚡
GPU RENDERING
Planets, rings, orbital paths, and the starfield background are all rendered via WebGL through Three.js. The simulation targets 60fps on any modern browser without plugins or downloads — including mobile.
▸ THREE.JS · WEBGL · 60FPS TARGET
⏱
TIME CONTROL
The simulation can run at real time, accelerated time, or reverse time — letting you watch years of orbital motion compressed into seconds, or observe where the planets were on any historical date.
▸ REAL TIME · ACCELERATED · HISTORICAL
// 3D SOLAR SYSTEM — KEPLERIAN ORBITAL MECHANICS — NASA JPL DATA
LIVE
DRAG TO ROTATE · SCROLL TO ZOOM · CLICK A PLANET TO SELECT
The eight planets represent only a fraction of the solar system's complexity. Beyond Neptune lies the Kuiper Belt — a disc of icy bodies extending from 30 to 50 AU (astronomical units), home to Pluto, Eris, Makemake, and Haumea. Beyond that, extending to perhaps 100,000 AU, is the theoretical Oort Cloud — a vast spherical shell of long-period comets that has never been directly observed but whose existence is inferred from the trajectories of comets that periodically fall inward toward the Sun.
// THE SOLAR SYSTEM'S TRUE OUTER BOUNDARY
The heliopause — where the solar wind is finally stopped by interstellar medium pressure — lies at about 120 AU from the Sun. Voyager 1 crossed this boundary in 2012, becoming the first human-made object to enter interstellar space. At its current speed of 17 km/s, it would take Voyager 1 approximately 300 years to reach the inner Oort Cloud — and 30,000 years to pass through it entirely.
The nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, is 4.37 light-years away — approximately 268,000 AU. At Voyager 1's speed, that journey would take over 73,000 years. The solar system, vast as it seems in the simulation above, is a tiny island in an incomprehensibly large ocean.