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In English, the planet Mars is named after Mars, the Roman god of war, [1] an association made because of its red color, which suggests blood. [2] The adjectival form of Latin Mars is Martius, [3] from which the English word Martian derives, used as an adjective or for a putative inhabitant of Mars, and Martial, used as an adjective corresponding to Terrestrial for Earth. [4]
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.
For instance, for a large portion of names ending in -s, the oblique stem and therefore the English adjective changes the -s to a -d, -t, or -r, as in Mars–Martian, Pallas–Palladian and Ceres–Cererian; [note 1] occasionally an -n has been lost historically from the nominative form, and reappears in the oblique and therefore in the English ...
The name originated from the fact that these planets orbit closer to the Sun than the Earth and hence, in the geocentric cosmology of Ptolemy, both appear to travel with the Sun across the sky. This is in contrast to the so-called superior planets, such as Mars, which appear to move independently of the Sun. infrared astronomy
These designations are sometimes written like "S/2003 S1", dropping the second space. The letter following the category and year identifies the planet (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune; although no occurrence of the other planets is expected, Mars and Mercury are disambiguated through the use of Hermes for the latter).
Named after the Roman god of war, it is often referred to as the "Red Planet" [1] [2] because the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance. Mars is a terrestrial planet with a thin atmosphere , having surface features reminiscent both of the impact craters of the Moon and the valleys, deserts, and polar ice caps of Earth .
The word "Barsoom", the native Martian word for Mars, is composed of the Martian name for planet, "soom", and the Martian word for eight, "bar". This reflects counting Mars as the eighth body in the inner solar system, by counting not just planets, but the Sun and the satellites of Earth and of Mars. [6]
The Solar System has eight planets by the most restrictive definition of the term: the terrestrial planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, and the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The best available theory of planet formation is the nebular hypothesis , which posits that an interstellar cloud collapses out of a nebula to ...