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The not-planets

The not-planets

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Montage by Emily Lakdawalla. The Moon: Gari Arrillaga. Other data: NASA/JPL/JHUAPL/SwRI/UCLA/MPS/IDA. Processing by Ted Stryk, Gordan Ugarkovic, Emily Lakdawalla, and Jason Perry.

The not-planets
The solar system contains dozens of objects that are large enough for self-gravity to make them round, and yet are not considered planets. They include the major moons of the planets, one asteroid, and many worlds in the Kuiper belt. The ones that we have visited with spacecraft are shown here to scale with each other. A couple of items on here are not quite round, illustrating the transition to smaller, lumpier objects.

Here is a version without text.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For uses not allowed by that license, contact us to request publication permission from the copyright holder: Emily Lakdawalla : Gordan Ugarkovic : Jason Perry : Ted Stryk

Original image data dated on or about July 13, 2015

Explore related images: Enceladus, Dione, Tethys, Titan, Rhea, Iapetus, Dawn, Saturn's moons, Mimas, Jupiter's moons, Io, Pluto, Europa, scale comparisons, Ganymede, amateur image processing, Charon, Callisto, the Moon, asteroid 4 Vesta, New Horizons, Cassini, Galileo, asteroid 1 Ceres, pretty pictures, Triton, Neptune's moons, Uranus' moons

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