The planets are very interesting to look at. Imagine you're looking at a birds eye view of all nine planets (we'll include Pluto for old times sake). There's a giant, yellow orb that is extremely bright. That's the sun. Next to it is a little tiny red dot. That would be Mercury. Not very far from it is Venus. It is about the same size as Earth, but it's much hotter. After Venus would be Earth, our planet. Next would be Mars, the red planet. We're exploring it as we speak! There's not another planet for a little way, but what are those tiny dots? That's the Asteroid Belt. How did they get there? No one really knows, but what if it was another planet that exploded, but the remains never left our solar system? A further distance away would be Jupiter. It's massive compared to the other planets! It has rings, but they're so faint you can't see them from here. Keep going and we'll come across Saturn. You can see Saturn's rings. A lot farther from Saturn is another gas giant, it's blue, but it's not as big as Jupiter or Saturn. It is Uranus. It's so far away from the sun! But, even further is another blue gas planet, about the same size as Uranus, but it's Neptune. It's a long way between them. Even further is the once-planet Pluto! It's smaller than our moon! You can barely see it from here. But beyond Pluto, we don't know what other planets are out there. There could be thousands more planets, or there could be nothing. We don't know for sure. Did you notice that the planets before the asteroid belt seem to be squished together near the sun? Maybe we'll never know why they're like that. What do you think?

Here's a link to compare the planets!

http://www.sciencenetlinks.com/interactives/messenger/psc/PlanetSize.html