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Vesta and Pallas are nonetheless sometimes considered small terrestrial planets anyway by sources preferring a geophysical definition, because they do share similarities to the rocky planets of the inner solar system. [56] The fourth-largest asteroid, Hygiea (radius 216.5 ± 4 km), is icy.
While Earth is the only place in the Universe known to harbor life, [10] [11] estimates of habitable zones around other stars, [12] [13] along with the discovery of thousands of exoplanets and new insights into the extreme habitats on Earth where organisms known as extremophiles live, suggest that there may be many more habitable places in the ...
The net result is that an object at the Equator experiences a weaker gravitational pull than an object on one of the poles. In combination, the equatorial bulge and the effects of the surface centrifugal force due to rotation mean that sea-level gravity increases from about 9.780 m/s 2 at the Equator to about 9.832 m/s 2 at the poles, so an ...
A planet's atmospheric conditions influence its ability to retain heat so that the location of the habitable zone is also specific to each type of planet: desert planets (also known as dry planets), with very little water, will have less water vapor in the atmosphere than Earth and so have a reduced greenhouse effect, meaning that a desert ...
The planets' orbits are chaotic over longer time scales, in such a way that the whole Solar System possesses a Lyapunov time in the range of 2~230 million years. [3] In all cases, this means that the positions of individual planets along their orbits ultimately become impossible to predict with any certainty.
Earth (0.98–1.02 AU) [D 6] is the only place in the universe where life and surface liquid water are known to exist. [102] Earth's atmosphere contains 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, which is the result of the presence of life. [103] [104] The planet has a complex climate and weather system, with conditions differing drastically between climate ...
The table below shows comparative gravitational accelerations at the surface of the Sun, the Earth's moon, each of the planets in the Solar System and their major moons, Ceres, Pluto, and Eris. For gaseous bodies, the "surface" is taken to mean visible surface: the cloud tops of the giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune), and the ...
Planetary habitability in the Solar System is the study that searches the possible existence of past or present extraterrestrial life in those celestial bodies. As exoplanets are too far away and can only be studied by indirect means, the celestial bodies in the Solar System allow for a much more detailed study: direct telescope observation, space probes, rovers and even human spaceflight.