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There are eight planets within the Solar System; planets outside of the solar system are also known as exoplanets. Artist's concept of the potentially habitable exoplanet Kepler-186f As of 14 February 2025, there are 5,834 confirmed exoplanets in 4,356 planetary systems , with 977 systems having more than one planet . [ 1 ]
The Solar System [d] is the gravitationally bound system of the Sun and the objects that orbit it. [11] It formed about 4.6 billion years ago when a dense region of a molecular cloud collapsed, forming the Sun and a protoplanetary disc.
Initially, the names given to minor planets followed the same pattern as the other planets: names from Greek or Roman myths, with a preference for female names. With the discovery in 1898 of the first body found to cross the orbit of Mars, a different choice was deemed appropriate, and 433 Eros was chosen.
41 of the 118 known elements have names associated with, or specifically named for, places around the world or among astronomical objects. 32 of these have names tied to the places on Earth, and the other nine are named after to Solar System objects: helium for the Sun; tellurium for the Earth; selenium for the Moon; mercury (indirectly), uranium, neptunium and plutonium after their respective ...
Asteroids number in the hundreds of thousands. For longer lists, see list of exceptional asteroids, list of asteroids, or list of Solar System objects by size. Asteroid moons; A number of smaller groups distinct from the asteroid belt; The outer Solar System with the giant planets, their satellites, trojan asteroids and some minor planets. Jupiter
The Greeks assigned each planet to one among their pantheon of gods, the Olympians and the earlier Titans: [164] Helios and Selene were the names of both planets and gods, both of them Titans (later supplanted by Olympians Apollo and Artemis); Phainon was sacred to Cronus, the Titan who fathered the Olympians;
A class of extrasolar planets whose characteristics are similar to Jupiter, but that have high surface temperatures because they orbit very close—between approximately 0.015 and 0.5 AU (2.2 × 10 ^ 6 and 74.8 × 10 ^ 6 km)—to their parent stars, whereas Jupiter orbits its parent star (the Sun) at 5.2 AU (780 × 10 ^ 6 km), causing low ...
A chemical element, often simply called an element, is a type of atom which has a specific number of protons in its atomic nucleus (i.e., a specific atomic number, or Z). [ 1 ] The definitive visualisation of all 118 elements is the periodic table of the elements , whose history along the principles of the periodic law was one of the founding ...