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← 🪐 Space · usually met in Std 5-10

The solar system

One ordinary star, eight planets, several dwarf planets and a very great deal of smaller debris, all held in orbit by the Sun's gravity.

In order from the Sun Sun Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune asteroid belt Sizes are roughly to scale with each other. The DISTANCES are not, and cannot be: if the Sun were a football, Earth would be a peppercorn 26 metres away and Neptune most of a kilometre off.
Drawn for Star Student.
The Sun and the planets, photographed by spacecraft
NASA (public domain) · Public domain · where it came from ↗

The four inner planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars — are small, rocky and close together. Beyond the asteroid belt the four outer ones — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune — are enormous and made mostly of gas and ice. Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006, not because anything about it changed, but because enough similar objects were found that the word planet had to be defined properly.

Distances are the part that never fits on a classroom poster. If the Sun were a football, the Earth would be a peppercorn about 26 metres away, and Neptune would be most of a kilometre off. Light from the Sun reaches us in eight minutes and takes over four hours to reach Neptune.

Worth knowing

  • Venus is hotter than Mercury despite being further out, because of a runaway greenhouse effect in its thick atmosphere.
  • A day on Venus is longer than its year, and it turns the opposite way to most planets.
  • Jupiter's mass is more than twice that of all the other planets put together.

Want to see it moving? Search YouTube for “The solar system” ↗ — we send you to the search rather than to one video, because a link to one video eventually rots.

See also

🪐 The Sun⚛️ Gravity🪐 The Moon

🧭 Do not take our word for it

This entry was written for Star Student in our own words — it is a summary, not a source. Here is where the people who actually hold these facts keep them. Go and check.

Your own textbook ↗Balbharati publishes the textbooks free to read online. Your chapter is the thing to check first — an encyclopedia is a summary, and the syllabus is the syllabus. ISRO ↗India's space agency — missions, instruments and results, first hand. NASA — the solar system ↗Planetary data and images from the people flying the spacecraft.

Last gone through: 1 October 2026 · How these entries are written

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