The Sun contains nearly all the mass in our solar system
The Sun is unimaginably massive. It accounts for about 99.86% of the total mass of the entire solar system. Most of the remaining 0.14% is contained within the gas giant planets, especially Jupiter. Earth and the other rocky planets make up only a tiny fraction of a percent of the solar system's matter.
The Absolute Dominance of Solar Mass
When surveying the solar system, human intuition is easily misled by the sheer diversity of worlds. Detailed maps showcase four rocky inner planets, four giant outer planets, dozens of major moons, and rings of asteroids, comets, and icy debris stretching across billions of kilometers. Yet in terms of sheer physical matter, nearly everything that exists in our celestial neighborhood is concentrated in a single central body. The Sun accounts for approximately 99.86 percent of the entire mass of the solar system, rendering every other planet, moon, asteroid, and comet a minuscule leftover by comparison.
To put this imbalance into perspective, if the entire solar system were reduced to a scale of one thousand kilograms, the Sun would weigh nine hundred and ninety-eight point six kilograms. The remaining one point four kilograms would have to be divided among all eight planets, hundreds of known moons, dwarf planets such as Pluto and Ceres, and the trillions of icy bodies residing in the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud. The terrestrial world we inhabit represents an almost negligible speck within that remaining fraction of matter.
Where the Remaining Fraction Resides
The small sliver of mass that did not collapse into the Sun is itself distributed with extreme inequality. Most of that remaining 0.14 percent is locked inside the four outer giant planets. Jupiter alone contains more mass than all other planets, moons, and minor bodies combined, holding roughly two and a half times the collective mass of everything else orbiting the Sun. Together with Saturn, the two gas giants constitute the vast majority of the non-solar mass in the system.
The ice giants, Uranus and Neptune, hold a smaller but still significant portion of the remaining planetary matter. By the time one reaches the terrestrial realm—comprising Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—the available mass drops dramatically. Earth is the densest and most massive of the terrestrial planets, yet its mass is merely a fraction of a percent of Jupiter's, and an utterly infinitesimal component of the solar system as a whole. The entire asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter contains only a tiny fraction of the mass of Earth's Moon.