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Earth
Details
Earth is the rocky planet on which we live and the most familiar anchor for planetary scale. It remains the only world known to host life, with long-lived surface oceans that have shaped both its geology and its atmosphere.
Earth is the rocky world we know best, but it behaves less like a static sphere than a set of linked systems. Ocean, atmosphere, crust, and life all interact, which is why the planet still feels active even though it is our home.
Its air is mostly nitrogen and oxygen, its oceans cover about 71 percent of the surface, and its tilted axis gives rise to seasons. Earth also rotates in just under 24 hours, while plate tectonics keeps changing continents, coastlines, mountains, and ocean basins. The Moon helps stabilize that system by moderating the planet’s wobble and, with it, part of the long-term climate rhythm.
That is what makes Earth such a powerful reference point. It is not interesting because it is ordinary. It is interesting because it shows how many conditions have to line up for a rocky world to become a living one. Earth is less a generic planet than a carefully balanced exception.
4,733km
Key facts
- Category
- Planets
- Object class
- Terrestrial planet
- Composition
- Silicate rock and iron core
- Temperature
- ~288 K mean surface
Scale context
Where Earth sits on the full axis
Together, these objects make the size change around Earth easy to compare at a glance.
Between the smallest and the largest, perspective is everything.
About
Scale of Space is a scroll-based journey through the universe, placing objects on a single logarithmic scale so you can compare size across an unbroken range.
Guides turn parts of that scale into curated essays, while focused views let you explore the same range through specific groups of objects.