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The Sun, planets, moons and dwarf planets (true color, size to scale, distances not to scale) The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the Solar System: Solar System – gravitationally bound system comprising the Sun and the objects that orbit it, either directly or indirectly. Of those objects that orbit the ...
The eight planets of the Solar System with size to scale (up to down, left to right): Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune (outer planets), Earth, Venus, Mars, and Mercury (inner planets) A planet is a large, rounded astronomical body that is generally required to be in orbit around a star, stellar remnant, or brown dwarf, and is not one itself. [ 1]
Planetary mass. In astronomy, planetary mass is a measure of the mass of a planet -like astronomical object. Within the Solar System, planets are usually measured in the astronomical system of units, where the unit of mass is the solar mass ( M☉ ), the mass of the Sun. In the study of extrasolar planets, the unit of measure is typically the ...
Solar System models, especially mechanical models, called orreries, that illustrate the relative positions and motions of the planets and moons in the Solar System have been built for centuries. While they often showed relative sizes, these models were usually not built to scale. The enormous ratio of interplanetary distances to planetary ...
Solar System belts are asteroid and comet belts that orbit the Sun in the Solar System in interplanetary space. [ 1][ 2] The Solar System belts' size and placement are mostly a result of the Solar System having four giant planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune far from the sun. The giant planets must be in the correct place, not too close ...
A class of extrasolar planets whose characteristics are similar to Jupiter, but that have high surface temperatures because they orbit very close—between approximately 0.015 and 0.5 AU (2.2 × 10 ^ 6 and 74.8 × 10 ^ 6 km)—to their parent stars, whereas Jupiter orbits its parent star (the Sun) at 5.2 AU (780 × 10 ^ 6 km), causing low ...
The Drake equation is a probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy. [ 1][ 2][ 3] The equation was formulated in 1961 by Frank Drake, not for purposes of quantifying the number of civilizations, but as a way to stimulate scientific dialogue at the first ...
If the Sun–Neptune distance is scaled to 100 meters (330 ft), then the Sun would be about 3 cm (1.2 in) in diameter (roughly two-thirds the diameter of a golf ball), the giant planets would be all smaller than about 3 mm (0.12 in), and Earth's diameter along with that of the other terrestrial planets would be smaller than a flea (0.3 mm or 0. ...