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The Solar System travels alone through the Milky Way in a circular orbit approximately 30,000 light years from the Galactic Center. Its speed is about 220 km/s. The period required for the Solar System to complete one revolution around the Galactic Center, the galactic year, is in the range of 220–250 million years. Since its formation, the ...
The Solar System remains in a relatively stable, slowly evolving state by following isolated, gravitationally bound orbits around the Sun. [28] Although the Solar System has been fairly stable for billions of years, it is technically chaotic, and may eventually be disrupted. There is a small chance that another star will pass through the Solar ...
An extrasolar planet with a mass higher than Earth's, but substantially below the mass of the Solar System's smaller gas giants Uranus and Neptune, which are 14.5 and 17.1 Earth masses respectively. Kepler-10b, Gliese 667 Cc: Sub-Earth: A classification of planets "substantially less massive" than Earth and Venus. Mercury & Kepler-37b
Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to detect sodium and aluminum ions in the solar wind, as well as helium in the inner Solar System. [66] In November 1972, Pioneer 10 encountered Jupiter's enormous (compared to Earth) magnetosphere and would pass in and out of it and its heliosphere 17 times charting its interaction with the solar wind. [ 66 ]
Solar System – gravitationally bound system comprising the Sun and the objects that orbit it, either directly or indirectly. 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.
The Solar System is one of many planetary systems in the galaxy. [1] [2] The planetary system that contains Earth is named the "Solar" System. The word "solar" is derived from the Latin word for Sun, Sol (genitive Solis). Anything related to the Sun is called "solar": for example, stellar wind from the Sun is called solar wind.
For example, according to Kopparapu's habitable zone estimate, although the Solar System has a circumstellar habitable zone centered at 1.34 AU from the Sun, [5] a star with 0.25 times the luminosity of the Sun would have a habitable zone centered at , or 0.5, the distance from the star, corresponding to a distance of 0.67 AU. Various ...
The two current ecological approaches for predicting the potential habitability use 19 or 20 environmental factors, with emphasis on water availability, temperature, presence of nutrients, an energy source, and protection from solar ultraviolet and galactic cosmic radiation.