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Mercury is the first planet from the Sun and the smallest in the Solar System.In English, it is named after the ancient Roman god Mercurius (), god of commerce and communication, and the messenger of the gods.
The brightest planets in the sky have been named from ancient times. The scientific names are taken from the names given by the Romans: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Our own planet is usually named in English as Earth, or the equivalent in the language being spoken (for instance, two astronomers speaking French would call it la ...
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 ...
In 2016, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) organized a Working Group on Star Names (WGSN) [2] to catalog and standardize proper names for stars. The WGSN's first bulletin, dated July 2016, [3] included a table of 125 stars comprising the first two batches of names approved by the WGSN (on 30 June and 20 July 2016) together with names of stars adopted by the IAU Executive Committee ...
Its orbit revealed that it was a new planet, Uranus, the first ever discovered telescopically. [20] Giuseppe Piazzi discovered Ceres in 1801, a small world between Mars and Jupiter. It was considered another planet, but after subsequent discoveries of other small worlds in the same region, it and the others were eventually reclassified as ...
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 ...
1971 – Mariner 9 Mars spacecraft becomes the first to successfully orbit another planet. [185] It provides the first detailed maps of the Martian surface, [186] discovering much of the planet's topography, including the volcano Olympus Mons and the canyon system Valles Marineris, which is named in its honor.
To the naked eye, Venus appears as a white point of light brighter than any other planet or star (apart from the Sun). [179] The planet's mean apparent magnitude is −4.14 with a standard deviation of 0.31. [19] The brightest magnitude occurs during the crescent phase about one month before or after an inferior conjunction.