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This diagram shows various possible elongations (ε), each of which is the angular distance between a planet and the Sun from Earth's perspective. In astronomy, a planet's elongation is the angular separation between the Sun and the planet, with Earth as the reference point. [1] The greatest elongation is the maximum angular separation.
Newton defined the force acting on a planet to be the product of its mass and the acceleration (see Newton's laws of motion). So: Every planet is attracted towards the Sun. The force acting on a planet is directly proportional to the mass of the planet and is inversely proportional to the square of its distance from the Sun.
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 Sun and planets of the Solar System (distances not to scale). The Solar System is the gravitationally bound system of the Sun and the objects that orbit it. It formed about 4.6 billion years ago when a dense region of a molecular cloud collapsed, forming the Sun and a protoplanetary disc.
For example, if a TNO is incorrectly assumed to have a mass of 3.59 × 10 20 kg based on a radius of 350 km with a density of 2 g/cm 3 but is later discovered to have a radius of only 175 km with a density of 0.5 g/cm 3, its true mass would be only 1.12 × 10 19 kg.
The red planet is stationary; the force F(r) is balanced by a repulsive inverse-cube force. A GIF version of this animation is found here. Figure 2: The radius r of the green and blue planets are the same, but their angular speed differs by a factor k. Examples of such orbits are shown in Figures 1 and 3–5.
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For any two bodies in which one body orbits around the other, such as a star/planet or planet/moon system, there are five such points, denoted L 1 through L 5. For instance, the Earth–Moon L 1 point lies on a line between the two, where gravitational forces between them exactly balance with the centrifugal force of an object placed in orbit ...