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With the exception of Mercury, the orbits of the system's planets lie closer to Jupiter's orbital plane than the Sun's equatorial plane. The Kirkwood gaps in the asteroid belt are mostly caused by Jupiter, [212] and the planet may have been responsible for the Late Heavy Bombardment in the inner Solar System's history. [213]
Interior planet now seems to be the preferred term for astronomers. Inferior/interior and superior are different from the terms inner planet and outer planet, which designate those planets that lie inside the asteroid belt and those that lie outside it, respectively. Inferior planet is also different from minor planet or dwarf planet.
Inner planet: A planet in the Solar System that have orbits smaller than the asteroid belt. [nb 2] Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars: Outer planet: A planet in the Solar System beyond the asteroid belt, and hence refers to the gas giants. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune Pulsar planet: A planet that orbits a pulsar or a rapidly rotating neutron star.
Jupiter might have shaped the Solar System on its grand tack. In planetary astronomy, the grand tack hypothesis proposes that Jupiter formed at a distance of 3.5 AU from the Sun, then migrated inward to 1.5 AU, before reversing course due to capturing Saturn in an orbital resonance, eventually halting near its current orbit at 5.2 AU.
The eight planets of the Solar System with size to scale (up to down, left to right): Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune (outer planets), Earth, Venus, Mars, and Mercury (inner planets) A planet is a large, rounded astronomical body that is generally required to be in orbit around a star, stellar remnant, or brown dwarf, and is not one itself. [1]
The asteroid and comet belts orbit the Sun from the inner rocky planets into outer parts of the Solar System, interstellar space. [16] [17] [18] An astronomical unit, or AU, is the distance from Earth to the Sun, which is approximately 150 billion meters (93 million miles). [19]
NASA's Juno spacecraft recently flew by Jupiter, collecting crucial data -- and the best look we've gotten at the planet in a very long time. This is the closest photo of Jupiter anyone has seen ...
A chain of craters on Ganymede, probably caused by a similar impact event.The picture covers an area approximately 190 km (120 mi) across. Jupiter is a gas giant planet with no solid surface; the lowest atmospheric layer, the troposphere, gradually changes into the planet's inner layers. [10]