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The timeline of discovery of Solar System planets and their natural satellites charts the progress of the discovery of new bodies over history. Each object is listed in chronological order of its discovery (multiple dates occur when the moments of imaging, observation, and publication differ), identified through its various designations (including temporary and permanent schemes), and the ...
The order of the planets was conjecture until Kepler determined the distances from the Sun of the five known planets that were not Earth. It had been conjectured that the fixed stars were much farther away than the planets. Moon: Moon of a planet 3rd century BC 20 Earth radii (very inaccurate, true=64 Earth radii)
The stars with the most confirmed planets are the Sun (the Solar System's star) and Kepler-90, with 8 confirmed planets each, followed by TRAPPIST-1 with 7 planets. The 1,033 multiplanetary systems are listed below according to the star's distance from Earth. Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Solar System, has three planets (b, c and d).
1959 – Explorer 6 sends the first image of the entire Earth from space. [178] 1959 – Luna 3 sends the first images of another celestial body, the Moon, from space, including its unseen far side. [179] 1962 – Mariner 2 Venus flyby performs the first closeup observations of another planet. [180]
Irregular moons are probably minor planets that have been captured from surrounding space. Most irregular moons are less than 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) in diameter. The earliest published discovery of a moon other than Earth's was by Galileo Galilei, who discovered the four Galilean moons orbiting Jupiter in 1610. Over the following three ...
There are 7,408 known exoplanets, or planets outside the Solar System that orbit a star, as of January 26, 2024; only a small fraction of these are located in the vicinity of the Solar System. [2] Within 10 parsecs (32.6 light-years ), there are 106 exoplanets listed as confirmed by the NASA Exoplanet Archive .
Telescopic observations resulted in the discovery of moons and rings around planets, and new planets, comets and the asteroids; the recognition of planets as other worlds, of Earth as another planet, and stars as other suns; the identification of the Solar System as an entity in itself, and the determination of the distances to some nearby stars.
In 2013, astronomers using the Kepler space telescope's data estimated that about one-fifth of G-type and K-type stars (sun-like stars and orange dwarfs) are expected to have an Earth-sized or super-Earth-sized planet (1–2 Earths wide) close to an Earth-like orbit (0.25–4 F 🜨), [83] yielding about 8.8 billion of them for the entire Milky ...