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Venus rotates clockwise, and Uranus has been knocked on its side and rotates almost perpendicular to the rest of the Solar System. The ecliptic remains within 3° of the invariable plane over five million years, [ 2 ] but is now inclined about 23.44° to Earth's celestial equator used for the coordinates of poles.
The Kuiper belt is a ring of small icy worlds, similar to the asteroid belt but far larger, extending from Neptune's orbit at 30 AU out to about 55 AU from the Sun. [145] Much in the same way that Jupiter's gravity dominates the asteroid belt, Neptune's gravity dominates the Kuiper belt. Over the age of the Solar System, certain regions of the ...
Its namesake is William Lassell, the English astronomer who discovered Neptune's largest moon, Triton. [20] This ring is a faint sheet of material occupying the space between the Le Verrier ring at about 53,200 km and the Arago ring at 57,200 km. [ 4 ] Its average normal optical depth is around 10 −4 , which corresponds to an equivalent depth ...
For gaseous or fluid bodies, such as stars and giant planets, the period of rotation varies from the object's equator to its pole due to a phenomenon called differential rotation. Typically, the stated rotation period for a giant planet (such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) is its internal rotation period, as determined from the rotation ...
However, its atmosphere is opaque to visible light, so its surface remains obscured. 1982 – Venera 13 lands on Venus, sends the first photographs in color of its surface, and records atmospheric wind noises, the first sounds heard from another planet. [204] 1986 – Voyager 2 provides the first ever detailed images of Uranus, its moons and rings.
Another common form of resonance in the Solar System is spin–orbit resonance, where the rotation period (the time it takes the planet or moon to rotate once about its axis) has a simple numerical relationship with its orbital period. An example is the Moon, which is in a 1:1 spin–orbit resonance that keeps its far side away from
New "planets" were discovered every year; as a result, astronomers began tabulating the asteroids (minor planets) separately from the major planets and assigning them numbers instead of abstract planetary symbols, [153] although they continued to be considered as small planets. [184] Neptune was discovered in 1846, its position having been ...
The scattered disc was created when Neptune migrated outward into the proto-Kuiper belt, which at the time was much closer to the Sun, and left in its wake a population of dynamically stable objects that could never be affected by its orbit (the Kuiper belt proper), and a population whose perihelia are close enough that Neptune can still ...