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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.
Solar system diagram by Emanuel Bowen in 1747, when neither Uranus, Neptune, nor the asteroid belts had yet been discovered. Orbits of planets are to scale, but the orbits of moons and the sizes of bodies are not. The term "Solar System" entered the English language by 1704, when John Locke used it to refer to the Sun, planets, and comets. [290]
Euler diagram showing the types of bodies orbiting the Sun. The following is a list of Solar System objects by orbit, ordered by increasing distance from the Sun.Most named objects in this list have a diameter of 500 km or more.
The word galaxy is derived from the Greek galaxias (γαλαξίας), literally "milky", a reference to the Milky Way. Galaxies range in size from dwarfs with just a few billion (109) stars to giants with one hundred trillion (1014) stars, each orbiting its galaxy's center of mass.
According to recent studies, the Milky Way as well as the Andromeda Galaxy lie in what in the galaxy color–magnitude diagram is known as the "green valley", a region populated by galaxies in transition from the "blue cloud" (galaxies actively forming new stars) to the "red sequence" (galaxies that lack star formation). Star-formation activity ...
For the giant planets, the "radius" is defined as the distance from the center at which the atmosphere reaches 1 bar of atmospheric pressure. [ 11 ] Because Sedna and 2002 MS 4 have no known moons, directly determining their mass is impossible without sending a probe (estimated to be from 1.7x10 21 to 6.1×10 21 kg for Sedna [ 12 ] ).
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A star chart is a celestial map of the night sky with astronomical objects laid out on a grid system. They are used to identify and locate constellations , stars , nebulae , galaxies , and planets . [ 1 ]