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According to the IAU's explicit count, there are eight planets in the Solar System; four terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) and four giant planets, which can be divided further into two gas giants (Jupiter and Saturn) and two ice giants (Uranus and Neptune). When excluding the Sun, the four giant planets account for more than ...
In astronomy, Kepler's laws of planetary motion, published by Johannes Kepler in 1609 (except the third law, which was fully published in 1619), describe the orbits of planets around the Sun. These laws replaced circular orbits and epicycles in the heliocentric theory of Nicolaus Copernicus with elliptical orbits and explained how planetary ...
The blue planet feels only an inverse-square force and moves on an ellipse (k = 1). The green planet moves angularly three times as fast as the blue planet (k = 3); it completes three orbits for every orbit of the blue planet. The red planet illustrates purely radial motion with no angular motion (k = 0).
Three of the four inner planets (Venus, Earth, and Mars) have atmospheres substantial enough to generate weather; all have impact craters and tectonic surface features, such as rift valleys and volcanoes. [91] Mercury (0.31–0.59 AU from the Sun) [D 6] is the smallest planet in the Solar System.
Motion of the Solar System's barycenter relative to the Sun. As many of the objects listed below have some of the most extreme orbits of any objects in the Solar System, describing their orbit precisely can be particularly difficult and sensitive to the time the orbit is defined at.
Astronomers have discovered a rare in-sync solar system with six planets moving like a grand cosmic orchestra, untouched by outside forces since their birth billions of years ago. The find ...
In the patched conic approximation, once an object leaves the planet's SOI, the primary/only gravitational influence is the Sun (until the object enters another body's SOI). Because the definition of r SOI relies on the presence of the Sun and a planet, the term is only applicable in a three-body or greater system and requires the mass of the ...
Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, 07.03.03: "Voyage to the Planets" by Nicholas R. Perrone, 2007 (accessed November 2010) Journey Through the Galaxy: "Planets of the Solar System" by Stuart Robbins and David McDonald, 2006 (accessed November 2010) The Nine Planets, "Appendix 2: Solar System Extrema" by Bill Arnett, 2007 (accessed November 2010)