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Traditionally, small bodies orbiting the Sun were classified as comets, asteroids, or meteoroids, with anything smaller than one meter across being called a meteoroid. The term asteroid, never officially defined, [ 11 ] can be informally used to mean "an irregularly shaped rocky body orbiting the Sun that does not qualify as a planet or a dwarf ...
These lists contain the Sun, the planets, dwarf planets, many of the larger small Solar System bodies (which includes the asteroids), all named natural satellites, and a number of smaller objects of historical or scientific interest, such as comets and near-Earth objects.
Euler diagram showing the types of bodies orbiting the Sun. The following is a list of Solar System objects by orbit, ordered by increasing distance from the Sun. Most named objects in this list have a diameter of 500 km or more. The Sun, a spectral class G2V main-sequence star; The inner Solar System and the terrestrial planets. 2021 PH27; Mercury
The vulcanoids are a hypothetical population of asteroids that orbit the Sun in a dynamically stable zone inside the orbit of the planet Mercury. They are named after the hypothetical planet Vulcan , which was proposed on the basis of irregularities in Mercury's orbit that were later found to be explained by general relativity .
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 ...
A near-Earth object (NEO) is any small Solar System body orbiting the Sun whose closest approach to the Sun is less than 1.3 times the Earth–Sun distance (astronomical unit, AU). [2] This definition applies to the object's orbit around the Sun, rather than its current position, thus an object with such an orbit is considered an NEO even at ...
An Earth trojan is an asteroid that orbits the Sun in the vicinity of the Earth–Sun Lagrange points L 4 (leading 60°) or L 5 (trailing 60°), thus having an orbit similar to Earth's. Only two Earth trojans have so far been discovered.
Lucy is a NASA space probe on a twelve-year journey to eight different asteroids. It is slated to visit two main belt asteroids as well as six Jupiter trojans – asteroids that share Jupiter's orbit around the Sun, orbiting either ahead of or behind the planet. [4] [5] All target encounters will be flyby encounters. [6]