Neptune - Ice Giant

3D Model

Neptune is dark, cold, and very windy. It’s the last of the planets in our solar system. It’s more than 30 times as far from the Sun as Earth is.

Neptune is very similar to Uranus. It’s made of a thick soup of water, ammonia, and methane over an Earth-sized solid center. Its atmosphere is made of hydrogen, helium, and methane. The methane gives Neptune the same blue color as Uranus.

Facts about Neptune:

1. About four times wider than Earth. If Earth were a large apple, Neptune would be the size of a basketball.
2. Orbits our Sun, a star, and is the eighth planet from the Sun at a distance of about 2.8 billion miles (4.5 billion kilometers).
3. Takes about 16 hours to rotate once (a Neptunian day), and about 165 Earth years to orbit the sun (a Neptunian year).
4. Is an ice giant. Most of its mass is a hot, dense fluid of “icy” materials – water, methane and ammonia – above a small rocky core.
5. Neptune’s atmosphere is made up mostly of molecular hydrogen, atomic helium and methane.