The smallest planet in our solar system is Mercury and the largest planet is Jupiter.

Smallest Planet: Mercury

Smallest planet Mercury
Mercury is a tiny black dot as it transits the Sun in 2006.
Fred Espenak

There are a couple of different ways to measure how “big” something is. The first is an object’s mass (how much matter it contains) and the second is its volume (how much space it takes up). The smallest planet in regards to both mass and volume is Mercury — at 4,879 km across and 3.3010 x 1023 kg, this tiny world is nearly 20 times less massive than Earth, and its diameter is about 2½ times smaller. In fact, Mercury is closer in size to our Moon than to Earth.

In case you're wondering, though, Mercury is still significantly larger than the dwarf planet Pluto: Pluto's equatorial diameter is just 2,302 km, about half Mercury's width.

Further Reading:


Hold Mercury in your hand: Sky & Telescope offers a 12-inch Mercury globe based on imagery from NASA's Messenger spacecraft.


Largest Planet: Jupiter

Jupiter on July 27 (UT), 2018
Sean Walker

The largest planet in our solar system by far is Jupiter, which beats out all the other planets in both mass and volume. Jupiter’s mass is more than 300 times that of Earth, and its diameter, at 140,000 km, is about 11 times Earth’s diameter. (Jupiter's Great Red Spot, even at its current diminished size, spans 15,900, just over a full Earth diameter.) Jupiter is 2½ times more massive than the rest of the planets in the solar system combined. Despite its bulk, though, Jupiter has a fast rotation period of just 10 hours!

Further Reading:

Planet Size Comparison

planet size comparison
Planet size comparison for our solar system, in order of increasing distance from the Sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. (Dwarf planet Pluto is also shown.)
NASA Lunar and Planetary Institute

Find a "by the numbers" comparison for all the planets courtesy of NASA:



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