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A typical navagraha shrine found inside a Hindu temple. The term planet was applied originally only to the five planets known (i.e., visible to the naked eye) and excluded the Earth. The term was later generalized, particularly during the Middle Ages, to include the sun and the moon (sometimes referred to as "lights"), making a total of seven ...
Size (left) and distance (right) of a few well-known galaxies put to scale. There are an estimated 100 billion galaxies in all of the observable universe. [1] On the order of 100,000 galaxies make up the Local Supercluster, and about 51 galaxies are in the Local Group (see list of nearest galaxies for a complete list).
Mars, the fourth planet from the Sun, is named after the Roman god of war because of its blood red color. Mars has two small, oddly-shaped moons, Phobos and Deimos, named after the sons of the Greek god Ares. At some point in the future Phobos will be broken up by gravitational forces. The atmosphere on Mars is 95% carbon dioxide.
French astronomers began calling it Herschel before German Johann Bode proposed the name Uranus, after the Greek god. The name "Uranus" did not come into common usage until around 1850. Starting in 1801, asteroids were discovered between Mars and Jupiter. The first few (Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta) were initially considered planets. As more and ...
In both the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, Jupiter was named after the chief god of the divine pantheon: Zeus to the Greeks and Jupiter to the Romans. [19] The International Astronomical Union formally adopted the name Jupiter for the planet in 1976 and has since named its newly discovered satellites for the god's lovers, favourites, and descendants. [20]
Alan Stern calls these satellite planets, although the term major moon is more common. The smallest natural satellite that is gravitationally rounded is Saturn I Mimas (radius 198.2 ± 0.4 km ). This is smaller than the largest natural satellite that is known not to be gravitationally rounded, Neptune VIII Proteus (radius 210 ± 7 km ).
NGC 1232, also known as the Eye of God Galaxy is an intermediate spiral galaxy about 60 million light-years away [2] in the constellation Eridanus. It was discovered by German-British astronomer William Herschel on 20 October 1784.
The Moon's atmosphere is extremely thin, consisting of a partial vacuum with particle densities of under 10 7 per cm −3. [115] Mars (1.38–1.67 AU) [D 6] has a radius about half of that of Earth. [116] Most of the planet is red due to iron oxide in Martian soil, [117] and the polar regions are covered in white ice caps made of water and ...