How to read the lattice
The rubber-sheet demo flattens space to two dimensions and then uses gravity to pull the ball down into the sheet. Here the grid fills all three dimensions and nothing pulls downward. Every mass draws the lines around it inward, from above, below, and every side.
What the bending shows
Each body pulls the grid toward itself by an amount that follows its gravitational potential, GM/r. That quantity also sets how much clocks slow down near a mass, so the color of the lines tracks the same thing: blue lines are where clocks run at their normal rate, and amber and white lines are where they run slower.
For things that move slowly, like planets and moons, nearly all of what we feel as gravity comes from that slowing of time. The bending of space matters more for fast things like light, which the Sun deflects by 1.75 arcseconds as it grazes past.
What is to scale
| Body sizes, Sun included, relative to each other | True |
| Planet positions for the date shown | JPL elements |
| Orbit shapes, tilts, and periods | True |
| Axial tilts and moon orbit planes | True, approx. |
| Moon periods, and our Moon's phase | True |
| Distances from the Sun | Square root |
| Moon distances from their planets | Compressed |
| Starting places of moons other than ours | Illustrative |
How much it is exaggerated
The real warping is tiny. At the Sun's surface, space is stretched by about two parts in a million. At Earth's surface it is under one part in a billion. To make it visible, the grid exaggerates the effect enormously.
Mass is the harder problem. The Sun outweighs Jupiter a thousand times and Earth a third of a million times, so with true ratios the planets leave no visible mark. The default view compresses masses by taking their cube root, which lets every planet and large moon carve its own dimple. Switch Masses to True ratios to watch the planets' wells all but vanish into the Sun's.
Things left out
Mars's moons Phobos and Deimos are about 11 and 6 km in radius, too small to show at this scale. Dwarf planets, rings other than Saturn's, and the asteroid belt are left out too. When time runs fast, planet spin is capped so the surfaces don't strobe. Earth's spin angle is arbitrary, so the side facing the Sun doesn't match the real time of day.
Credits
Earth's surface is NASA Earth Observatory's Blue Marble: Next Generation, from September 2004. Its clouds and every other world's surface are drawn by the page.