plate 1 · the solar system
one star, eight planets, and a great deal of gravel. the sun holds 99.86% of the system’s mass; jupiter holds most of the rest. both maps below show true orbits and the true positions of the planets on the day this page was generated.
inner system, 2026-09-04
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1 mercury 2 venus 3 earth 4 mars. sun-mars: 12.6 light-min
outer system, 2026-09-04 (J S U N)
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the whole inner system fits inside the '+'.
the system does not end at neptune. it fades out over four more orders of magnitude — belt, heliopause, scattered disc, oort cloud. the ladder below is logarithmic: each step down multiplies the distance by ten to the one-seventh.
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|-- mercury
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|-- venus
1 AU +-- earth
|-- mars
|: asteroid belt (2.1-3.3 AU)
|:
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|-- jupiter
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10 AU +-- saturn
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|-- uranus
|-- neptune
|: kuiper belt (30-50 AU); pluto avg 39.5
|:
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100 AU +-- heliopause: the solar wind yields
|-- voyager 1, sept 2026 (~23.5 light-hours)
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10^3 +-- sedna at aphelion
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|: inner oort cloud (hills cloud)
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10^4 +:
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|-- outer oort cloud: ~1 light-year
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10^5 +
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|-- proxima centauri, 4.25 ly
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voyager 1, launched 1977, is the farthest object we have ever thrown: about 170 AU out as of this month, and not even a thousandth of the way to the oort cloud’s outer edge. its signal takes almost a full day to reach us. the sun’s gravitational reach extends to roughly 100,000 AU — halfway to proxima centauri — and comets out there still count as locals.