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The surface gravity, g, of an astronomical object is the gravitational acceleration experienced at its surface at the equator, including the effects of rotation. The surface gravity may be thought of as the acceleration due to gravity experienced by a hypothetical test particle which is very close to the object's surface and which, in order not to disturb the system, has negligible mass.
The furthest known objects, such as Comet West, have aphelia around 70,000 AU from the Sun. [155] The Sun's Hill sphere with respect to the galactic nucleus, the effective range of its gravitational influence, was calculated by G. A. Chebotarev to be 230,000 AU.
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 ...
The table below shows comparative gravitational accelerations at the surface of the Sun, the Earth's moon, each of the planets in the Solar System and their major moons, Ceres, Pluto, and Eris. For gaseous bodies, the "surface" is taken to mean visible surface: the cloud tops of the giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune), and the ...
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 ...
In the patched conic approximation, once an object leaves the planet's SOI, the primary/only gravitational influence is the Sun (until the object enters another body's SOI). Because the definition of r SOI relies on the presence of the Sun and a planet, the term is only applicable in a three-body or greater system and requires the mass of the ...
The surface abundance of Li on the Sun is 140 times less than the protosolar value (i.e. the primordial abundance at the Sun's birth), [18] yet the temperature at the base of the surface convective zone is not hot enough to burn – and hence deplete – Li. [19] This is known as the solar lithium problem.
Two important Lagrange points in the Sun-Earth system are L 1, between the Sun and Earth, and L 2, on the same line at the opposite side of the Earth; both are well outside the Moon's orbit. Currently, an artificial satellite called the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) is located at L 1 to study solar wind coming toward Earth from the ...