Live 3D model
Interactive 3D Solar System
Real planets, moons, exoplanets and galaxies, live in your browser. Select any world to open its dossier.
What you can visit
The Sun, all eight planets and their major moons, Pluto and Charon, Voyager 1, a black hole, the Orion Nebula, the Andromeda Galaxy and six exoplanets. Exoplanets are labelled artist's concepts: no telescope has resolved their surfaces.
Where the data comes from
Planet maps come from NASA mission imagery (via Solar System Scope), the Moon from NASA LRO, Pluto from New Horizons, and the spacecraft from NASA 3D Resources. Every number in a dossier cites its source, with an as-of date where it changes. Asset credits.
What is not to scale
Sizes and distances are compressed so every body can be seen up close. Travelling between destinations plays a wormhole transit, a visual device rather than a claim about real spaceflight.
How to move around
Drag to orbit, scroll or pinch to zoom, and press ? for keyboard shortcuts. The Atlas lists every destination; the Info button brings this panel back.
Field guide121 entries
Every body and topic in this model. Select a name to open its dossier; bodies at another destination are reached by wormhole.
Solar System
· G2V main-sequence star · 4.6 billion years old
An ordinary yellow-white dwarf star holding 99.8% of the Solar System's mass.
Spectral type: G2 V · Effective temperature: 5,772 K (about 5,500 °C)
· Smallest planet · iron-heavy and airless
A small, dense world whose iron core fills 85% of its radius.
Mean distance from Sun: 0.387 AU (57.9 million km) · Rotation (sidereal): 58.6 Earth days
· Runaway greenhouse twin of Earth
Nearly Earth's size, but buried under a CO₂ atmosphere 92 times as heavy, with sulfuric-acid clouds and a 464 °C surface: hotter than Mercury.
Mean distance from Sun: 0.723 AU (108.2 million km) · Rotation (sidereal): 243.0 Earth days, retrograde
· The only known world with life
The densest planet and the only one known with stable surface oceans, active plate tectonics and life.
Mean distance from Sun: 1.000 AU (149.6 million km) · Rotation (sidereal): 23.93 hours
· Earth's only natural satellite
· Cold desert with an ancient wet past
A cold, dusty world with the largest volcano and deepest canyon system in the Solar System.
Mean distance from Sun: 1.524 AU (227.9 million km) · Rotation (sidereal): 24.62 hours
· Mars's doomed inner moon
· Mars's small, smooth outer moon
· Largest planet · gas giant
More than twice as massive as all the other planets combined, Jupiter spins once every 9.9 hours.
Mean distance from Sun: 5.20 AU (778.5 million km) · Year: 11.86 Earth years
· The most volcanic world known
· An ocean world under ice
· The largest moon in the Solar System
· The most heavily cratered object known
· Ringed gas giant
The only planet less dense than water, wrapped in rings that span 282,000 km yet are typically about 10 m thick.
Mean distance from Sun: 9.54 AU (1.43 billion km) · Rotation: 10.66 hours
· The 'Death Star' moon with a hidden ocean
· The moon that sprays its ocean into space
· Ice moon split by a giant canyon
· Cratered moon laced with ice cliffs
· Saturn's second-largest moon
· A moon with weather, rivers and seas
· The two-faced moon
· Ice giant tipped on its side
Tilted 97.8°, Uranus rolls around the Sun on its side, giving each pole about 42 years of continuous daylight.
Mean distance from Sun: 19.19 AU (2.87 billion km) · Rotation: 17 h 14 min 52 s, retrograde
· A patchwork moon with record cliffs
· Uranus's youngest, brightest face
· The darkest of Uranus's large moons
· Uranus's largest moon
· The outermost major moon of Uranus
· Windiest world · found by mathematics
The outermost planet, predicted from Uranus's wobbles before anyone saw it.
Mean distance from Sun: 30.07 AU (4.50 billion km) · Rotation: 16.11 hours
· A captured world orbiting backwards
· Dwarf planet · heart of the Kuiper belt
Reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006, Pluto turned out to be anything but a frozen relic: New Horizons found nitrogen glaciers, water-ice mountains and a layered blue haze.
Mean radius: 1,188.3 km (0.19 Earth) · Mass: 1.303 × 10²² kg (0.0022 Earth)
· Pluto's half-sized partner
· First spacecraft in interstellar space
Launched in 1977 for a Jupiter and Saturn flyby, Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause in 2012 and on 18 Nov 2026 becomes the first human-made object one light-day from Earth.
One light-day from Earth: 18 Nov 2026, 10:16:07 UTC · Launched: Sep 1977
Deep space
· Seven Earth-sized worlds · about 40.5 light-years
A cool red dwarf barely larger than Jupiter, circled by seven rocky planets packed inside a distance smaller than Mercury's orbit.
Star: M8 V ultracool dwarf, 2,566 K · Orbital periods: 1.511 to 18.773 days
· The nearest exoplanet · 4.24 light-years
A planet at least as massive as Earth orbiting the closest star to the Sun, inside its habitable zone.
Distance: 4.24 light-years · Minimum mass: 1.055 ± 0.055 Earth masses
· A temperate super-Earth, possibly icy
A dense world in its star's habitable zone.
Distance: About 48.9 light-years · Star: M4.5 V red dwarf, 3,096 K
· A sub-Neptune at the centre of a biosignature debate
A world 2.4 times Earth's width that gets Earth-like sunlight.
Distance: About 124 light-years · Star: M2.5 V red dwarf, 3,457 K
· A lava world with a variable atmosphere
A super-Earth so close to its star that a year lasts 17.7 hours.
Distance: About 41 light-years · Star: G8 V, 5,172 K
· A cobalt-blue world that smells of rotten eggs
One of the few exoplanets with a measured colour: deep blue, from hazes of silicate particles.
Distance: About 64.5 light-years · Star: K2 V orange dwarf, 5,052 K
· Event horizon · gravity light cannot escape
A region where spacetime curves so steeply that nothing, not even light, can climb back out past the event horizon.
Innermost stable orbit: 3 horizon radii (non-spinning)
· A hypothetical shortcut through spacetime
General relativity allows tunnels linking distant regions of spacetime, but none has ever been observed.
Throat tension (10 m throat): About 5 × 10⁴⁰ Pa
· M42 · the nearest large stellar nursery
A glowing cloud of gas and dust about 1,300–1,350 light-years away in Orion's sword, lit by a cluster of hot young stars.
Distance: About 1,300–1,350 light-years · Catalogue: M42 / NGC 1976
· M31 · the nearest large spiral
A spiral galaxy 2.5 million light-years away, larger than the Milky Way and visible to the naked eye.
Distance: About 2.5 million light-years · Type: Spiral, SA(s)b
Phenomena
· The black hole at the centre of the Milky Way
A black hole of about 4.3 million solar masses, 27,000 light-years away.
· The first black hole ever imaged
A 6.5-billion-solar-mass black hole 55 million light-years away whose shadow the Event Horizon Telescope revealed in April 2019.
· City-sized stellar cores
The collapsed cores of massive stars: more mass than the Sun crushed into a ball about 20 km wide, so dense a sugar cube of it would weigh about a trillion kilograms.
· Cosmic lighthouses
Spinning neutron stars whose beams sweep past Earth like a lighthouse.
· The strongest magnets in the universe
Neutron stars with magnetic fields a thousand times stronger still.
· How stars explode
Massive stars end by collapsing and rebounding in a core-collapse supernova; white dwarfs can detonate in a thermonuclear one.
· Feeding supermassive black holes
The brilliant centres of galaxies whose black holes are swallowing gas, outshining all the host galaxy's stars.
· The brightest gamma-ray burst ever recorded
On 9 October 2022 a collapsing star about 2 billion light-years away unleashed a burst so bright it saturated most gamma-ray detectors in orbit: likely the brightest seen in 10,000 years.
· Millisecond flashes from across the universe
Radio flashes lasting thousandths of a second, mostly from distant galaxies.
· Ripples in spacetime
Merging black holes and neutron stars shake spacetime itself.
· The oldest light in the universe
Light released about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when the universe cooled enough to become transparent.
· The 95% we cannot see
Ordinary matter makes up only about 5% of the universe.
· 13.8 billion years in one view
From the first fractions of a second to today, 13.787 billion years.
Galaxies
· Our barred spiral home galaxy
A barred spiral about 100,000 light-years across holding 100–400 billion stars.
· M33 · the third large Local Group spiral
A loose, nearly face-on spiral about 3 million light-years away, roughly half the Milky Way's width and busy forming stars.
· The Milky Way's biggest satellite
A barred dwarf galaxy about 161,000 light-years away, visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere.
· An irregular dwarf, stretched by its neighbours
A dwarf galaxy about 204,000 light-years away, elongated along our line of sight by the pull of the LMC and the Milky Way.
· Giant elliptical with the first imaged black hole
The dominant galaxy of the Virgo Cluster, holding several trillion stars, about 15,000 globular clusters and the 6.5-billion-solar-mass black hole M87*.
· M104 · a bright bulge ringed by dust
Seen just 6° from edge-on, a brilliant bulge wrapped in a sharp ring of dust.
· M51 · the textbook grand-design spiral
A face-on spiral whose two sharp arms are being stirred by a smaller companion, NGC 5195, passing behind one arm tip.
· M101 · nearly twice the Milky Way's width
A lopsided face-on spiral 170,000 light-years across with at least a trillion stars.
· The nearest active galaxy
A giant elliptical crossed by a warped dust lane left by a merger, with jets from its central black hole blowing radio lobes far beyond the visible galaxy.
· A ring galaxy made by a collision
About 500 million light-years away, a smaller galaxy punched straight through this one, sending a ripple of star formation outward like a stone dropped in a pond.
· Four interacting galaxies and an interloper
Four galaxies about 290 million light-years away locked in repeated close encounters, plus a fifth, NGC 7320, much nearer and only in the same line of sight.
· Two spirals merging
A pair of colliding galaxies forming billions of stars in super star clusters, trailing two long tidal tails.
· The most distant galaxies confirmed
Webb has confirmed galaxies shining just 280–290 million years after the Big Bang.
· Filaments, voids and Laniakea
On the largest scales galaxies trace a web of filaments around vast empty voids.
Nebulae
· M1 · the wreck of the supernova of 1054
The expanding debris of a star whose explosion Chinese astronomers recorded in 1054 CE.
· Star-forming columns in the Eagle Nebula
Columns of cold gas and dust about 6,500 light-years away, sculpted by starlight, with new stars forming inside.
· The edge of a star-carved cavity
The wall of a giant bubble blown by young massive stars in NGC 3324, about 7,600 light-years away, imaged in Webb's first release.
· M57 · a dying Sun-like star
Gas shed by a star like the Sun at the end of its life, glowing around a white dwarf.
· The nearest bright planetary nebula
About 650 light-years away, the Helix is the closest bright planetary nebula.
· Clouds where stars are born or die
Nebulae are clouds of gas and dust.
Exoplanets
· Planets around other stars
More than 6,400 planets have been confirmed around other stars, most found by the tiny dips they cause as they cross their star's face.
· First Earth-size planet found in a habitable zone
Found by Kepler in 2014, this world is only 17% wider than Earth and sits at the cool outer edge of its red dwarf's habitable zone.
· An 'Earth cousin' that may not be real
Announced in 2015 as a near-Earth twin around a Sun-like star.
· JWST's first exoplanet carbon dioxide
A puffy hot Saturn that became JWST's benchmark: the first clear carbon dioxide in an exoplanet atmosphere and the first evidence of photochemistry on another world.
· Where it may rain iron
An ultra-hot Jupiter whose 2,000+ K dayside vaporises iron.
· TESS's first Earth-size habitable-zone world
An Earth-sized planet around a quiet red dwarf, found by TESS in 2020.
· A real world with two suns
A cold, Saturn-like planet orbiting a pair of stars that eclipse each other every 41 days: the first confirmed transiting circumbinary planet.
· The first exoplanets ever confirmed
Three planets orbiting a dead star, a millisecond pulsar, found in 1992 from tiny delays in its radio pulses, three years before the first planet around a Sun-like star.
· A pitch-black planet spiralling into its star
One of the darkest planets known and one of the hottest, stretched into an egg shape by its star.
· Four giant planets photographed directly
A young star with four giant planets that telescopes can image as points of light.
· The planet that started it all
The first planet found around a Sun-like star, in 1995: a giant on a 4.2-day orbit, a 'hot Jupiter' that nobody had predicted.
Dwarf planets
· Dwarf planet · largest body in the asteroid belt
The first asteroid ever found is also a dwarf planet holding a quarter of the main belt's mass.
Mean diameter: 939.4 km · Shape: 964 × 964 × 892 km
Small bodies
· Rocky debris between Mars and Jupiter
Leftovers that Jupiter's gravity kept from ever forming a planet.
· A layered protoplanet
The second-largest body in the asteroid belt, with a crust, mantle and iron core like a planet in miniature.
· A metal-rich world NASA is flying to
An asteroid about 220 km across that may be the exposed iron-nickel core of a shattered protoplanet.
· Rubble-pile asteroid sampled by OSIRIS-REx
A spinning-top pile of rubble about 490 m wide, darker than charcoal.
· Diamond-shaped asteroid sampled by Hayabusa2
A dark, primitive asteroid about 900 m wide.
· The asteroid that will skim Earth in 2029
A 340 m asteroid that will pass closer than many satellites on 13 April 2029, visible to the naked eye.
· The icy disc beyond Neptune
A broad doughnut of icy bodies beyond Neptune's orbit, home to Pluto, Arrokoth and many short-period comets.
· The most distant world explored up close
Two flattened lobes joined at a narrow neck, 36 km long, merged so gently that neither broke.
· The most famous comet
A dark, peanut-shaped nucleus that returns every 76 years on a backward orbit.
· The comet Rosetta orbited
A duck-shaped comet about 4 km long, less dense than water ice.
· The first known interstellar visitor
Discovered in October 2017 already leaving, this elongated or flattened object came from another star system, showed no tail, yet accelerated slightly as it left.
· The first interstellar comet
Found by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov in August 2019, it looked like an ordinary comet, but carried unusually large amounts of carbon monoxide.
· The third interstellar object, and the fastest
Discovered on 1 July 2025, this comet from another star passed the Sun in October 2025 on the most hyperbolic path yet seen.
Edge of the Solar System
· The Solar System's distant icy shell
A vast, never-seen sphere of icy bodies thousands to perhaps 100,000 AU from the Sun, the source of long-period comets.
· The bubble blown by the solar wind
The solar wind inflates a bubble around the Solar System.
· The only visitor to Uranus and Neptune
Voyager 2 used a rare planetary alignment to visit all four giant planets, then crossed the heliopause in November 2018 on a different path from its twin.
· Beyond Earth's neighbourhood
Deep space usually means beyond the Earth–Moon system: first interplanetary space, then interstellar space past the heliopause, about 120 AU out.
Missions
· NASA's ocean-world explorer
NASA's largest planetary spacecraft is cruising to Jupiter to test whether Europa's hidden ocean could support life, using 49 close flybys from April 2030.
· ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer
ESA's JUICE will study Europa, Callisto and Ganymede, then become the first spacecraft to orbit a moon other than our own.
· ESA–JAXA Mercury mission
Two orbiters travelling as one stack are about to settle around Mercury in November 2026 after an eight-year cruise with nine planetary flybys.
· JAXA's Phobos sample return
JAXA's MMX is scheduled to launch on 19 Oct 2026 to survey both Martian moons, land on Phobos and bring a sample to Earth in 2031.
· NASA's return to the Moon
Artemis II sent four astronauts around the Moon in April 2026.
· China's lunar south-pole mission
A four-part robotic mission to look for water ice at the lunar south pole.
· NASA's Jupiter polar orbiter
Juno has orbited Jupiter since 2016, mapping its gravity, magnetic field and deep atmosphere, and flying close to Io, Europa and Ganymede.
· A rotorcraft for Titan
An eight-rotor, nuclear-powered drone that will hop between sites on Titan, sampling organic sand and the floor of an impact crater.
· NASA's journey to a metal-rich asteroid
A solar-electric spacecraft heading for 16 Psyche, an asteroid that may be the exposed core of a shattered protoplanet.
· The fastest human-made object
Parker flies through the Sun's outer atmosphere at up to 692,000 km/h, closer than any spacecraft before it.
· Pluto and the Kuiper belt
The first spacecraft to Pluto, and the only one to explore a Kuiper belt object up close.
· Infrared observatory at L2
Webb's 6.5 m mirror sees in infrared from about 1.5 million km away, revealing the earliest galaxies and the atmospheres of exoplanets.
· Crewed laboratory in low Earth orbit
A football-field-sized laboratory circling Earth about every 90 minutes, continuously crewed since November 2000 by a partnership of five space agencies.
Topics
· Gravity so strong light cannot escape
A black hole forms when matter is crushed into a region where spacetime curves so steeply that nothing, including light, can climb out past the event horizon.
· A hypothetical tunnel through spacetime
A wormhole is a theoretical shortcut connecting two distant regions of spacetime.
· Our barred spiral home galaxy
The Milky Way holds 100–400 billion stars, a supermassive black hole, a dark-matter halo and vast nebulae.
· Island universes in an expanding cosmos
Galaxies are gravitational cities of stars, gas, dust and dark matter.