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Mars comes closer to Earth more than any other planet save Venus at its nearest—56 million km is the closest distance between Mars and Earth, whereas the closest Venus comes to Earth is 40 million km. Mars comes closest to Earth every other year, around the time of its opposition, when Earth is sweeping between the Sun and Mars.
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun.The surface of Mars is orange-red because it is covered in iron(III) oxide dust, giving it the nickname "the Red Planet". [22] [23] Mars is among the brightest objects in Earth's sky, and its high-contrast albedo features have made it a common subject for telescope viewing.
The principal component of the Solar System is the Sun, a G-type main-sequence star that contains 99.86% of the system's known mass and dominates it gravitationally. [37] The Sun's four largest orbiting bodies, the giant planets, account for 99% of the remaining mass, with Jupiter and Saturn together comprising more than 90%.
The habitable zone of Gliese 581 compared with the Solar System's habitable zone. The 2007 discovery of Gliese 581c, the first super-Earth in the circumstellar habitable zone, created significant interest in the system by the scientific community, although the planet was later found to have extreme surface conditions that may resemble Venus. [137]
"Inferior planet" refers to Mercury and Venus, which are closer to the Sun than Earth is. "Superior planet" refers to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune (the latter two added later), which are farther from the Sun than Earth is. The terms are sometimes used more generally; for example, Earth is an inferior planet relative to Mars.
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 ...
The closest encounter to the Sun so far predicted is the low-mass orange dwarf star Gliese 710 / HIP 89825 with roughly 60% the mass of the Sun. [4] It is currently predicted to pass 0.1696 ± 0.0065 ly (10 635 ± 500 au) from the Sun in 1.290 ± 0.04 million years from the present, close enough to significantly disturb the Solar System's Oort ...
Venus to scale among the Inner Solar System planetary-mass objects beside the Sun, arranged by the order of their orbits outward from the Sun (from left: Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, Mars and Ceres) Venus is one of the four terrestrial planets in the Solar System, meaning that it is a