3D Model of the Solar System, Stars, Galaxies and Black Holes
A first-person flight through the Solar System, with its moons, dwarf planets and comets, out to nearby stars, nebulae, galaxies and black holes. Pick a destination or fly freely, and select any object for facts.
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Facts come from NASA, JPL, ESA and ESO pages. Open the list to check any figure.
Controls
- Look around: drag with the mouse or a finger.
- Fly: W, A, S and D or the arrow keys. R and F move up and down. Shift gives a speed boost, and the scroll wheel changes the base speed.
- Touch screens: hold the Forward or Back button while dragging to steer.
- Fly to a body: the Fly to bar at the bottom has five groups: Sun and planets, Moons, Dwarf planets and comets, Stars and nebulae, and Galaxies and black holes. Choose a group, then a destination. The buttons work with a keyboard too.
- Phones and tablets: swiping up or down on the model scrolls the page. Tap Look freely to turn page scrolling off and look in any direction, and tap it again (it then says Scroll page) to scroll.
- Facts: click or tap any body, star, nebula, galaxy or black hole.
- Constellations: the Constellations button draws the constellation lines and names on the sky behind you. They show how the sky looks from the Sun, so they do not change as you fly to another star.
- Speed: flying speed adapts to the distance, so crossing between galaxies takes seconds.
What the model shows
The Sun and the eight planets with their rings and atmospheres; sixteen moons including all four Galilean moons, Titan, Triton and Charon; the dwarf planets Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Eris; the asteroid Vesta; Halley’s Comet with a tail that grows as it nears the Sun; and the near-Earth asteroid Apophis. Orbits move in real time order, but at an exaggerated pace. The planets orbit counter-clockwise as seen from above the north pole, as they do in reality, and the dwarf planets, Halley and Apophis follow orbits with their true shapes and tilts. Faint rings of dots mark the asteroid belt, the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud, which has never been seen directly.
Sizes and distances are not to scale: at true scale the planets would be nearly invisible specks, so the model enlarges them, enlarges the moons even more, and pulls the orbits closer together.
Stars and nebulae
Beyond the Oort cloud are six nearby stars and star systems (Proxima Centauri, Alpha Centauri A and B, Sirius A and B, Vega, Betelgeuse, and TRAPPIST-1 with its seven planets) and four nebulae: the Orion Nebula, the Pleiades, the Crab Nebula and the Ring Nebula. They sit in their real directions as seen from the Sun, and the background shows every star visible to the naked eye in its real place, with the real Milky Way band. Distances are compressed on a logarithmic scale, and star sizes are strongly compressed too, so Betelgeuse appears only about 19 times larger than the Sun instead of about 700 times. The cloud shapes are artistic models.
Galaxies and black holes
Farther out the model includes the Milky Way, its central black hole Sagittarius A*, the stellar-mass black hole Cygnus X-1, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), the Triangulum Galaxy (M33), the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51), the Sombrero Galaxy (M104), the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 and its black hole M87*. Their distances and sizes are heavily compressed so that all of them can be reached in a short flight, and their shapes are artistic models based on how astronomers describe each object, not images or maps. Where sources disagree on a distance, a range is given.