Distance of the Planets from the Sun
Most Solar System diagrams place the planets in evenly spaced rows. Real orbits are enormously stretched: Neptune sits thirty times farther from the Sun than Earth. This chart uses a compressed scale, honestly labelled.
Key takeaways
- Earth is defined as one astronomical unit (1 AU) from the Sun.
- Neptune sits at roughly 30 AU — thirty times Earth's orbital distance.
- Most of the Solar System is empty space; the giant-planet region alone spans tens of AU.
- Elliptical orbits mean the actual distance to any planet changes over its year.
About this visual
Astronomers measure Solar System distances in astronomical units. One AU is the average distance from Earth to the Sun — about 150 million kilometres, or roughly 8.3 light-minutes.
Mercury sits at just 0.39 AU. Venus, 0.72 AU. Mars, 1.52 AU. Then the distances stretch: Jupiter is at 5.2 AU, Saturn 9.58 AU, Uranus 19.18 AU and Neptune 30.07 AU. Neptune is thirty times farther from the Sun than Earth is.
Why a linear diagram cannot work
Draw Mercury as one pixel at the left edge and Neptune to scale, and the page would need to be several metres wide. Shrink Neptune onto the page and Mercury and Venus overlap into a smudge. The chart above uses a logarithmic axis, which is honest about both extremes at once.
The regions between the planets
Between Mars and Jupiter, the asteroid belt occupies a wide zone around 2.2 – 3.2 AU. Beyond Neptune, the Kuiper Belt stretches from roughly 30 to 50 AU and contains icy bodies including Pluto and other dwarf planets. Beyond that lies the hypothetical Oort Cloud, the reservoir of long-period comets, reaching possibly to 100,000 AU.
Orbits are ellipses, not circles
Each distance above is a semi-major axis — the average of a planet's closest and farthest points from the Sun. Real distances change over every orbit. Mercury's orbital eccentricity is large enough that its actual distance varies by roughly ± 20 % over a year.
Related infographics
Solar System
Planet Size Comparison
How big are the eight planets? Compare Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune at a shared diameter scale.
Cosmic Scale
Scale of the Observable Universe
A step-by-step logarithmic journey from Earth to the observable universe, with honest labels about what “observable” means.
Exoplanets
TRAPPIST-1 System Explained
Seven Earth-size planets orbiting a single ultracool dwarf in an extraordinarily compact resonant chain.
Read more on Universe & Planets
Sources and methodology
Values verified against official mission and archive pages on the updated date shown above. Numeric quantities are cited to the precision typical of introductory astronomy references.