Interactive 3D Solar System

This page loads straight into a real-time, three-dimensional model of the Solar System. The Sun, the eight planets, the dwarf planets, the major moons and several space probes appear at their instantaneous, ephemeris-based positions computed from Kepler orbital elements.

Rotate the view, zoom in on any body, or speed up time to watch weeks and years pass in seconds. Labels and info cards show real size, distance and orbital data for every planet.

You can travel further, too: zoom out to the Milky Way in a single click, then make a hyperspace jump to a galaxy far, far away.

More 3D views:Milky Way Star Wars galaxy

Objects shown in this view

Sun (G2V star): The Sun holds 99.86% of the Solar System’s mass.
Mercury (rocky planet): Its solar day is longer than its year.
Venus (rocky planet): The hottest planet (~465 °C), and it spins backwards.
Earth (rocky planet): The only world known to harbour life.
Moon (moon): It drifts ~3.8 cm farther from Earth every year.
Phobos (moon): It orbits faster than Mars rotates, so it rises in the west and sets in the east. It is spiralling inward and will break apart in a few tens of millions of years.
Deimos (moon): So small that from the surface of Mars it looks like little more than a bright star.
Amalthea (moon): The reddest known object in the Solar System, redder than Mars. It radiates more heat than it receives from the Sun.
Io (moon): The most volcanically active body in the Solar System: over 400 active volcanoes, kneaded from within by Jupiter's tides.
Europa (moon): A salty ocean hides beneath its icy crust, holding more water than all of Earth's seas combined.
Ganymede (moon): The largest moon in the Solar System, bigger than Mercury, and the only moon with its own magnetic field.
Callisto (moon): The most heavily cratered surface in the Solar System, essentially unchanged for four billion years.
Mimas (moon): The huge Herschel crater makes it look uncannily like the Death Star. An ocean may hide under its icy shell.
Enceladus (moon): Water geysers erupt from its south pole and feed Saturn's E ring. One of the most promising places to look for life.
Tethys (moon): Almost pure water ice, so light it would float on water. The Ithaca Chasma canyon runs three quarters of the way around it.
Dione (moon): Bright ice cliffs streak its trailing side. Voyager mistook them for clouds; Cassini revealed walls hundreds of metres high.
Rhea (moon): Saturn's second largest moon. It may have a faint ring system of its own, which would be unprecedented for a moon.
Titan (moon): The only moon with a thick atmosphere. Its rivers, lakes and rain are made of methane; Huygens landed there in 2005.
Hyperion (moon): A spongy, porous body that tumbles chaotically: its rotation is literally unpredictable, with no two days alike.
Iapetus (moon): One hemisphere is soot-dark, the other snow-white, and a 13 km high ridge runs along its equator, making it look like a walnut.
Phoebe (moon): It orbits backwards, so it was not born with Saturn: it is a captured object from the Kuiper belt.
Miranda (moon): Chasms up to 20 km deep scar its surface, as if it once shattered and reassembled itself at random.
Ariel (moon): The brightest of Uranus's moons, with young valley systems probably flooded by ice volcanism.
Umbriel (moon): The darkest of Uranus's moons. A single mysterious bright ring, the rim of Wunda crater, breaks its uniform dark surface.
Titania (moon): Uranus's largest moon, with a canyon system nearly 1,500 km long, one of the great fracture networks of the Solar System.
Oberon (moon): Dark material pools in its crater floors, and an 11 km mountain rises at its limb, spotted in silhouette by Voyager 2.
Proteus (moon): Right at the limit: a little larger and its own gravity would pull it into a sphere. Instead it stayed angular.
Triton (moon): It orbits backwards, so it is a dwarf planet captured from the Kuiper belt. Its nitrogen geysers still erupt at minus 235 Celsius.
Nereid (moon): One of the most eccentric orbits of any moon: it swings between 1.4 and 9.7 million km from Neptune.
Charon (moon): So large relative to Pluto that their common centre of mass lies outside Pluto: a true binary, each keeping one face turned to the other.
Styx (moon): Pluto's smallest known moon, found only in 2012 with Hubble, three years before New Horizons arrived.
Nix (moon): It tumbles chaotically in the double gravity field of Pluto and Charon, so it has no regular day-night cycle.
Kerberos (moon): It is made of two lobes stuck together, as if two smaller moons collided gently and merged.
Hydra (moon): Pluto's outermost moon. Its surface is almost pure water ice, making it strikingly bright, like fresh snow.
Mars (rocky planet): Olympus Mons is the largest volcano in the Solar System.
Jupiter (gas giant): More than twice as massive as all other planets combined.
Saturn (gas giant): Less dense than water, so in theory it would float.
Uranus (ice giant): It orbits lying on its side, tilted by 98°.
Neptune (ice giant): Home to the strongest winds in the Solar System (~2,100 km/h).
Pluto (dwarf planet): Counted as the ninth planet until 2006.
Ceres (dwarf planet): The largest object in the asteroid belt.
Eris (dwarf planet): Its discovery led to Pluto’s reclassification.
Makemake (dwarf planet): Named after the creator god of Easter Island.
Haumea (dwarf planet): The fastest-rotating large body: the spin stretched it egg-shaped, and it has its own ring.
Quaoar (dwarf planet candidate): A ring was found around it in 2023, far outside the Roche limit, where the debris should have coalesced into a moon instead.
Orcus (dwarf planet candidate): It sits in the same 2:3 resonance with Neptune as Pluto, but always in the opposite phase, which earned it the nickname anti-Pluto.
Gonggong (dwarf planet candidate): One of the reddest large bodies in the Solar System; its slow spin was probably braked by its moon, Xiangliu.
Sedna (dwarf planet candidate): Even at its closest it stays 76 AU from the Sun, so Neptune cannot have put it there: a passing star or an undiscovered planet may have.
Halley's Comet (comet): Next returns to the inner Solar System in 2061.
Comet Encke (comet): The shortest orbital period of any known comet: it laps the Sun more than twenty times in a human lifetime.
Tempel–Tuttle (comet): Parent of the Leonids, which in 1833 threw tens of thousands of meteors an hour across the sky.
Swift–Tuttle (comet): Parent of the Perseids, the best known meteor shower of the year.
Churyumov–Gerasimenko (comet): Rosetta escorted it for two years, and in 2014 Philae became the first craft to land on a comet nucleus.
Wild 2 (comet): Stardust caught grains from its tail and brought them back to Earth in 2006.
Tempel 1 (comet): Deep Impact fired a projectile into it in 2005 to expose the pristine material below the surface.
Hartley 2 (comet): EPOXI flew within 700 km in 2010: carbon dioxide jets blast out of the tiny nucleus.
Hale–Bopp (comet): It stayed visible to the naked eye for 18 months in 1997, still a record.
NEOWISE (comet): The brightest comet of the decade in the northern hemisphere, in the summer of 2020.
James Webb Space Telescope (space telescope): The largest space telescope ever built (2021).
Euclid Space Telescope (space telescope): ESA's dark matter and dark energy mapping mission: since 2023 it has been surveying a third of the sky, charting the shapes and distances of 1.5 billion galaxies.
Gaia Space Telescope (space telescope): ESA's star-mapping mission: spinning once every 6 hours, it charted the positions, motions and distances of nearly 2 billion stars; science operations ended in 2025.
Voyager 1 (space probe): The most distant human-made object, now in interstellar space.
Voyager 2 (space probe): The only probe to have visited Uranus and Neptune.
New Horizons (space probe): The first spacecraft to photograph Pluto up close (2015), later visiting the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth (2019) as well.
Parker Solar Probe (space probe): The fastest human-made object ever built: it reaches about 430,000 mph (192 km/s) at closest approach, passing closer to the Sun than any spacecraft before it, about 4.3 million miles (6.9 million km) from its surface.
BepiColombo (space probe): A joint ESA/JAXA mission: after nine gravity assists (Earth, Venus, then Mercury six times) it enters orbit around Mercury in November 2026, when the two probes it carries (MPO and MMO) will separate.
Juno (space probe): A solar-powered probe that skims just a few thousand km above Jupiter's cloud tops on every orbit to map the planet's interior and magnetic field.
International Space Station (space station): Continuously inhabited for over 25 years.
Tiangong (space station): Its name means “heavenly palace” (built since 2021).
Hubble Space Telescope (space telescope): In orbit since 1990, it is one of astronomy’s most influential instruments.