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Solar system diagram by Emanuel Bowen in 1747, when neither Uranus, Neptune, nor the asteroid belts had yet been discovered. Orbits of planets are to scale, but the orbits of moons and the sizes of bodies are not. The term "Solar System" entered the English language by 1704, when John Locke used it to refer to the Sun, planets, and comets. [290]
1704 – John Locke enters the term "Solar System" in the English language, when he used it to refer to the Sun, planets, and comets as a whole. [70] By then it had been stablished beyond doubt that planets are other worlds, and stars are other distant suns, so the whole Solar System is actually only a small part of an immensely large universe ...
This model posits that, 4.6 billion years ago, the Solar System was formed by the gravitational collapse of a giant molecular cloud spanning several light-years. Many stars, including the Sun, were formed within this collapsing cloud. The gas that formed the Solar System was slightly more massive than the Sun itself.
The history of astronomy focuses on the contributions civilizations have made to further their understanding of the universe beyond earth's atmosphere. [1] Astronomy is one of the oldest natural sciences, achieving a high level of success in the second half of the first
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 ...
Historical models of the Solar System; History of astronomy; Timeline of cosmological theories; The number of currently known, or observed, objects of the Solar System are in the hundreds of thousands. Many of them are listed in the following articles: List of Solar System objects; List of gravitationally rounded objects of the Solar System
The term "Solar System" entered the English language by 1704, when John Locke used it to refer to the Sun, planets, and comets as a whole. [82] By then it had been established beyond doubt that planets are other worlds, and stars are other distant suns, so the whole Solar System is actually only a small part of an immensely large universe, and ...
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 Sun is a G-type main-sequence star that makes up about 99.86% of the mass of the Solar System. [26]