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The astronomical unit is too small to be convenient for interstellar distances, where the parsec and light-year are widely used. The parsec (parallax arcsecond) is defined in terms of the astronomical unit, being the distance of an object with a parallax of 1″. The light-year is often used in popular works, but is not an approved non-SI unit ...
18 AU: This was the last planet discovered before the first successful measurement of stellar parallax. It had been determined that the stars were much farther away than the planets. Saturn: Planet of the Solar System 1619 − 1781 10 AU From Kepler's Third Law, it was finally determined that Saturn is indeed the outermost of the classical ...
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 ...
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 ...
Parts-per-million chart of the relative mass distribution of the Solar System, each cubelet denoting 2 × 10 24 kg. This article includes a list of the most massive known objects of the Solar System and partial lists of smaller objects by observed mean radius. These lists can be sorted according to an object's radius and mass and, for the most ...
This is a list of Solar System objects by greatest aphelion or the greatest distance from the Sun that the orbit could take it if the Sun and object were the only objects in the universe. It is implied that the object is orbiting the Sun in a two-body solution without the influence of the planets, passing stars, or the galaxy.
The presumed distance of the Oort cloud compared to the rest of the Solar System. The Oort cloud is thought to occupy a vast space somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 AU (0.03 and 0.08 ly) [11] from the Sun to as far out as 50,000 AU (0.79 ly) or even 100,000 to 200,000 AU (1.58 to 3.16 ly).
The perihelion distance is 29.81 AU, and the aphelion distance is 30.33 AU. [h] Neptune's orbital eccentricity is only 0.008678, making it the planet in the Solar System with the second most circular orbit after Venus. [133] The orbit of Neptune is inclined 1.77° compared to that of Earth.