All planets of our solar system can fit between the Earth & Moon

Here’s a fun scale fact about our solar system: all eight planets could fit between the Earth and the Moon if you lined them up edge to edge along the same line. The average distance from Earth to the Moon is about 384,000 kilometers, center to center, with the gap shrinking a bit at perigee and widening at apogee.

If you add up the planets’ widths using their average equatorial diameters—Mercury about 4,900 km, Venus about 12,100 km, Earth about 12,742 km, Mars about 6,800 km, Jupiter about 86,900 km, Saturn about 72,400 km, Uranus about 50,700 km, and Neptune about 49,200 km—you get roughly 296,000 kilometers in total. That’s a sizable spool of planetary width, yet it comes in well under the Earth–Moon distance, leaving on the order of 80,000 kilometers of spare room on average.

If you consider the space between surfaces rather than centers, the Earth–Moon gap is a bit different—about 376,000 kilometers on average. Even then, the combined diameters of the eight planets still fit with plenty of room to spare, depending on the Moon’s exact position in its orbit. Of course, this is a playful packing analogy: planets aren’t meant to be stacked, they’re spherical worlds with varied atmospheres and gravities, and the actual space between them is filled with countless other objects. But it’s a neat way to visualize just how vast the distance is in human terms.

This little calculation helps put cosmic scales into perspective and makes for a great trivia moment. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who loves to marvel at how the tiny dot of Earth sits in a far larger playground of planets and distances.