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720,000 km/h (450,000 mi/h) [ 10] Orbital period. ~230 million years [ 10] The Solar System[ d] is the gravitationally bound system of the Sun and the objects that orbit it. [ 11] It was formed about 4.6 billion years ago when a dense region of a molecular cloud collapsed, forming the Sun and a protoplanetary disc.
The Solar System is chaotic over million- and billion-year timescales, [101] with the orbits of the planets open to long-term variations. One notable example of this chaos is the Neptune–Pluto system, which lies in a 3:2 orbital resonance.
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]
It takes 224.7 Earth days for Venus to complete an orbit around the Sun, and a Venusian solar year is just under two Venusian days long. The orbits of Venus and Earth are the closest between any two Solar System planets, approaching each other in synodic periods of 1.6 years.
The timeline of discovery of Solar System planets and their natural satellites charts the progress of the discovery of new bodies over history. Each object is listed in chronological order of its discovery (multiple dates occur when the moments of imaging, observation, and publication differ), identified through its various designations (including temporary and permanent schemes), and the ...
The resonance makes a single solar day (the length between two meridian transits of the Sun) on Mercury last exactly two Mercury years, or about 176 Earth days. [ 110 ] Mercury's orbit is inclined by 7 degrees to the plane of Earth's orbit (the ecliptic ), the largest of all eight known solar planets. [ 111 ]
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest in the Solar System.It is a gas giant with a mass more than 2.5 times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined and slightly less than one-thousandth the mass of the Sun. Jupiter orbits the Sun at a distance of 5.20 AU (778.5 Gm), with an orbital period of 11.86 years.
The long orbital period of Neptune means that the seasons last for forty Earth years. [108] Its sidereal rotation period (day) is roughly 16.11 hours. [11] Because its axial tilt is comparable to Earth's, the variation in the length of its day over the course of its long year is not any more extreme.