Our Solar System

Our home.

Our solar system consists of our sun, plus nine planet-sized bodies, plus many bodies smaller than our Moon, and many many bodies that are smaller still.

This page is meant to give the reader a brief explanation of the other objects that orbit the same star as we do. Some information about each of the major bodies in the solar system follows.

The reader should take note of the fact that in the picture to the left, the planets are not depicted to scale. Saturn (the one with the flat layer of rings surrounding it) is only a little bigger than Earth (the blue and white marble-like one at the top of the image. The real size scales are given in the table below.

If the reader came seeking pictures, some are available here. Otherwise the reader might want to try some of the references.

The distances involved when talking about space are huge. We use AU for measuring distances within the solar system. 1 AU is the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun. We also sometimes measure mass in terms of solar masses; that is, if something were to mass 1 solar mass, it would mass the same as the Earth (roughly 1.5 million kilometres). The information presented here is not meant to be of the quality one would need to navigate our solar system; it is only for the purposes of scale that these numbers are presented.

Statistics and relative scales of the various planets:

Name	Mean Distance from Sol (AU)	Radius (km)	Orbital Period (Earth Years)	Mass (Earth Masses)
Mercury	0.39	0.38	0.24	0.055
Venus	0.72	0.95	0.62	0.82
Earth	1.0	1.0	1.0	1.0
Moon	-	0.27	-	0.012
Mars	1.52	0.53	1.9	0.11
Jupiter	5.2	11.2	11.9	318
Saturn	9.5	9.5	29.4	95
Uranus	19.2	4.0	84	15
Neptune	30.1	3.9	164	17
Pluto/Charon	30.5	0.2	284	0.002

Some pictures of our solar systems inhabitants are here.