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Neptune is 17 times the mass of Earth and is slightly more massive than its near-twin Uranus, which is 15 times the mass of Earth and slightly larger than Neptune. [a] Neptune orbits the Sun once every 164.8 years at an average distance of 30.1 astronomical units (4.50 × 10 9 km).
A telescope or strong binoculars will resolve Neptune as a small blue disk, similar in appearance to Uranus. [179] Because of the distance of Neptune from Earth, its angular diameter only ranges from 2.2 to 2.4 arcseconds, [8] [20] the smallest of the Solar System planets. Its small apparent size makes it challenging to study visually.
The size of solid bodies does not include an object's atmosphere. For example, Titan looks bigger than Ganymede, but its solid body is smaller. For the giant planets, the "radius" is defined as the distance from the center at which the atmosphere reaches 1 bar of atmospheric pressure. [11]
The moons of the trans-Neptunian objects (other than Charon) have not been included, because they appear to follow the normal situation for TNOs rather than the moons of Saturn and Uranus, and become solid at a larger size (900–1000 km diameter, rather than 400 km as for the moons of Saturn and Uranus).
Planets of mass similar to Uranus or Neptune; smaller than the gas giants, but still much larger than Earth. TOI-332b: Sub-Neptune: a planet with smaller radius than Neptune even though it may have a larger mass HD 110067 (b,c,d,e,f and g) Mini-Neptune: Also known as a gas dwarf or transitional planet. A planet up to 10 Earth masses, but less ...
Uranus has more hydrogen and helium than Neptune despite being less massive overall. Neptune is therefore denser and has much more internal heat and a more active atmosphere. The Nice model, in fact, suggests that Neptune formed closer to the Sun than Uranus did, and should therefore have more heavy elements.
Voyager 2/ISS images of Uranus and Neptune released shortly after the Voyager 2 flybys in 1986 and 1989, respectively, compared with a reprocessing of the individual filter images in this study to ...
Of those objects that orbit the Sun directly, the largest eight are the planets (including Earth), with the remainder being significantly smaller objects, such as dwarf planets and small Solar System bodies. Of the objects that orbit the Sun indirectly, the moons, two are larger than the smallest planet, Mercury.