Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Thus, the Sun occupies 0.00001% (1 part in 10 7) of the volume of a sphere with a radius the size of Earth's orbit, whereas Earth's volume is roughly 1 millionth (10 −6) that of the Sun. Jupiter, the largest planet, is 5.2 AU from the Sun and has a radius of 71,000 km (0.00047 AU; 44,000 mi), whereas the most distant planet, Neptune, is 30 AU ...
The listed objects currently include most objects in the asteroid belt and moons of the giant planets in this size range, but many newly discovered objects in the outer Solar System are missing, such as those included in the following reference. [58] Asteroid spectral types are mostly Tholen, but some might be SMASS.
One particularly distant body is 90377 Sedna, which was discovered in November 2003.It has an extremely eccentric orbit that takes it to an aphelion of 937 AU. [2] It takes over 10,000 years to orbit, and during the next 50 years it will slowly move closer to the Sun as it comes to perihelion at a distance of 76 AU from the Sun. [3] Sedna is the largest known sednoid, a class of objects that ...
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 Sun, a spectral class G2V main-sequence star; The inner Solar System and the terrestrial planets. Mercury
The asteroid and comet belts orbit the Sun from the inner rocky planets into outer parts of the Solar System, interstellar space. [16] [17] [18] An astronomical unit, or AU, is the distance from Earth to the Sun, which is approximately 150 billion meters (93 million miles). [19] Small Solar System objects are classified by their orbits: [20] [21]
Size comparison of the Sun, all the planets of the Solar System and some larger stars. The Sun is 1.4 million kilometers (4.643 light-seconds) wide, about 109 times wider than Earth, or four times the Lunar distance, and contains 99.86% of all Solar System mass.
The radii of these objects range over three orders of magnitude, from planetary-mass objects like dwarf planets and some moons to the planets and the Sun. This list does not include small Solar System bodies , but it does include a sample of possible planetary-mass objects whose shapes have yet to be determined.
The diurnal parallax of the Sun was accurately measured during the transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769, [5] yielding a value of 9″ (9 arcseconds, compared to the present value of 8.794 148 ″). From the value of the diurnal parallax, one can determine the distance to the Sun from the geometry of Earth. [6] [7]