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During the 1970s to 1980s, the increasing number of artificial satellites in Earth orbit further facilitated high-precision measurements, and the relative uncertainty was decreased by another three orders of magnitude, to about 2 × 10 −9 (1 in 500 million) as of 1992. Measurement involves observations of the distances from the satellite to ...
Jupiter might have shaped the Solar System on its grand tack. In planetary astronomy, the grand tack hypothesis proposes that Jupiter formed at a distance of 3.5 AU from the Sun, then migrated inward to 1.5 AU, before reversing course due to capturing Saturn in an orbital resonance, eventually halting near its current orbit at 5.2 AU.
According to the IAU's explicit count, there are eight planets in the Solar System; four terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) and four giant planets, which can be divided further into two gas giants (Jupiter and Saturn) and two ice giants (Uranus and Neptune). When excluding the Sun, the four giant planets account for more than ...
The Saturn-mass planet HD 149026 b has only two-thirds of Saturn's radius, so it may have a rock–ice core of 60 Earth masses or more. [39] CoRoT-20b has 4.24 times Jupiter's mass but a radius of only 0.84 that of Jupiter; it may have a metal core of 800 Earth masses if the heavy elements are concentrated in the core, or a core of 300 Earth ...
The sizes and masses of many of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are fairly well known due to numerous observations and interactions of the Galileo and Cassini orbiters; however, many of the moons with a radius less than ~100 km, such as Jupiter's Himalia, have far less certain masses. [5]
Animation of Saturn and the Solar System's outer planets orbiting around the Sun Simulated appearance of Saturn as seen from Earth (at opposition) during an orbit of Saturn, 2001–2029. The average distance between Saturn and the Sun is over 1.4 billion kilometers (9 AU). With an average orbital speed of 9.68 km/s, [6] it takes Saturn 10,759 ...
Saturn and Jupiter may be gas giants now, but according to some experts, they were once nothing more than tiny pebbles, and a recent study supports that assertion. The prevailing theory is that ...
For an object of mass the energy required to escape the Earth's gravitational field is GMm / r, a function of the object's mass (where r is radius of the Earth, nominally 6,371 kilometres (3,959 mi), G is the gravitational constant, and M is the mass of the Earth, M = 5.9736 × 10 24 kg).