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Contents. Historical models of the Solar System. Approximate sizes of the planets relative to each other. Outward from the Sun, the planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Jupiter's diameter is about 11 times that of the Earth's and the Sun's diameter is about 10 times Jupiter's.
v. t. e. The nebular hypothesis is the most widely accepted model in the field of cosmogony to explain the formation and evolution of the Solar System (as well as other planetary systems). It suggests the Solar System is formed from gas and dust orbiting the Sun which clumped up together to form the planets. The theory was developed by Immanuel ...
Andreas Cellarius 's illustration of the Copernican system, from the Harmonia Macrocosmica. Heliocentrism[ a ] (also known as the heliocentric model) is a superseded astronomical model in which the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun at the centre of the universe.
The path-line is the combined motion of the planet's orbit (deferent) around Earth and within the orbit itself (epicycle). In the Hipparchian, Ptolemaic, and Copernican systems of astronomy, the epicycle (from Ancient Greek ἐπίκυκλος (epíkuklos) 'upon the circle', meaning "circle moving on another circle") [ 1 ] was a geometric model ...
t. e. In astronomy, Kepler's laws of planetary motion, published by Johannes Kepler absent the third law in 1609 and fully in 1619, describe the orbits of planets around the Sun. These laws replaced circular orbits and epicycles in the heliocentric theory of Nicolaus Copernicus with elliptical orbits and explained how planetary velocities vary.
720,000 km/h (450,000 mi/h) [ 10 ] Orbital period. ~230 million years [ 10 ] The Solar System[ d ] is the gravitationally bound system of the Sun and the objects that orbit it. [ 11 ] It formed about 4.6 billion years ago when a dense region of a molecular cloud collapsed, forming the Sun and a protoplanetary disc.
The first recorded use of the term "Solar System" dates from 1704. [1][2] Since the seventeenth century, philosophers and scientists have been forming hypotheses concerning the origins of the Solar System and the Moon and attempting to predict how the Solar System would change in the future. René Descartes was the first to hypothesize on the ...
v. t. e. Orbital mechanics or astrodynamics is the application of ballistics and celestial mechanics to the practical problems concerning the motion of rockets, satellites, and other spacecraft. The motion of these objects is usually calculated from Newton's laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation.