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The adjectival forms of the names of astronomical bodies are not always easily predictable. Attested adjectival forms of the larger bodies are listed below, along with the two small Martian moons; in some cases they are accompanied by their demonymic equivalents, which denote hypothetical inhabitants of these bodies.
Venus is one of two planets in the Solar System, the other being Mercury, that have no moons. [23] Conditions perhaps favourable for life on Venus have been identified at its cloud layers. Venus may have had liquid surface water early in its history with a habitable environment , [ 24 ] [ 25 ] before a runaway greenhouse effect evaporated any ...
Older catalogues either assigned an arbitrary number to each object, or used a simple systematic naming scheme based on the constellation the star lies in, like the older Ptolemy's Almagest in Greek from 150 and Al-Sufi's Book of Fixed Stars in Arabic from 964. The variety of sky catalogues now in use means that most bright stars currently have ...
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 ...
Exceptions to this rule are valleys and craters on Mars and Venus; naming conventions for these features differ according to size. One feature classification, regio, was originally used on early maps of the Moon and Mercury (drawn from telescopic observations) to describe vague albedo features. It is now used to delineate a broad geographic region.
The sizes and masses of many of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are fairly well known due to numerous observations and interactions of the Galileo and Cassini orbiters; however, many of the moons with a radius less than ~100 km, such as Jupiter's Himalia, have far less certain masses. [5]
The Solar System is one of many planetary systems in the galaxy. [1] [2] The planetary system that contains Earth is named the "Solar" System. The word "solar" is derived from the Latin word for Sun, Sol (genitive Solis). Anything related to the Sun is called "solar": for example, stellar wind from the Sun is called solar wind.
When the object is found around a minor planet, the identifier used is the latter's number in parentheses. Thus, Dactyl , the moon of 243 Ida , was at first designated " S/1993 (243) 1 ". Once confirmed and named, it became (243) Ida I Dactyl .