Solar Model

Splashery stretches a drumhead over this Splash's outline, twelve inches across, and finds the ways it can ring. Its lowest is 1502.2 Hz, 226 cents sharp of E6, the nearest tine on the comb. The next fifteen are its overtones, and each one draws its own figure: sand gathers on the lines that stay still.

Tap to line up the planets and watch Mercury cross the Sun.

The solar system is the Sun and everything that circles it: eight planets, their moons, and many asteroids and comets. All the planets go around the Sun the same way, in orbits that lie nearly in one flat plane. The inner planets go around fastest: Mercury takes 88 days, Neptune about 165 years.

This is a model, not to scale: sizes and distances are squeezed so no two planets touch. Tap it and every planet swings into one row. The model tips until you look along its plane, and Mercury passes in front of the Sun as a small dark dot, which is called a transit. Then the planets spread out again. Real transits of Mercury happen about 13 times a century.

Made in Splashery. Its code is MIT.

This link opens it in the Playground. To put it on your own page, add the element and one script tag. Every option.