01Size3,475 kmDist384,400 kmTemp250 K (-23 °C)
The Moon
Earth's only natural satellite — locked to us forever.
SatelliteCosmos
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Our reference grain of sand.
NASA / Apollo 17
Picture this
Quantumaire's anchor: if Earth were a single grain of sand, the Moon would be a smaller speck about 1.5 cm away, and the Sun would be an apple roughly 6 metres off.
By weight
Earth weighs about a 6 followed by 21 zeros — in tonnes. Compress that into a peanut and you'd have a black hole.
If we shrink Earth down to a single 0.5 mm grain of sand, every other size in this journey changes by the same factor. At that scale the Sun is a billiard ball about six metres away, the Moon is a smaller speck just 1.5 cm from Earth, and the Milky Way spans about a hundred Earth-Moon distances. The trick is letting your sense of scale stretch.
Did you know?
Earth's day is slowly getting longer. When the first dinosaurs walked the planet, a day was less than 23 hours long; in a billion years it'll be over 25 hours.
Last updated 2026-05-17
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Scale
Our reference grain of sand.
Size
12,742 km
Tap a dot to preview it. Use the Open stop link to read its full page. Stops are arranged from smallest on the left to largest on the right.
Earth's only natural satellite — locked to us forever.
The Solar System's largest planet — a failed star, almost.
The closest known star to the Sun — and still impossibly far.