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The Sun and planets of the Solar System (distances not to scale). The Solar System is the gravitationally bound system of the Sun and the objects that orbit it. It formed about 4.6 billion years ago when a dense region of a molecular cloud collapsed, forming the Sun and a protoplanetary disc.
Before 2006, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto were considered as planets. Below are partial list of these mnemonics: "Men Very Easily Make Jugs Serve Useful Needs, Perhaps" – The structure of this sentence, which is current in the 1950s, suggests that it may have originated before Pluto's discovery.
The four outer planets, called giant planets or Jovian planets, collectively make up 99% of the mass orbiting the Sun. [h] All four giant planets have multiple moons and a ring system, although only Saturn's rings are easily observed from Earth. [91] Jupiter and Saturn are composed mainly of gases with extremely low melting points, such as ...
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.
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]
In 2007, the Venus Express mission confirmed the presence of lightning on Venus, finding that it is more common on Venus than it is on Earth. [35] [36] MESSENGER passed by Venus twice on its way to Mercury. The first time, it flew by on October 24, 2006, passing 3000 km from Venus. As Earth was on the other side of the Sun, no data was recorded ...
Since then, increasingly distant planets have been reached, with probes landing on or impacting the surfaces of Venus in 1966 , Mars in 1971 (Mars 3, although a fully successful landing didn't occur until Viking 1 in 1976), the asteroid Eros in 2001 (NEAR Shoemaker), Saturn's moon Titan in 2004 , the comets Tempel 1 (Deep Impact) in 2005, and ...
The geology of solar terrestrial planets mainly deals with the geological aspects of the four terrestrial planets of the Solar System – Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars – and one terrestrial dwarf planet: Ceres. Earth is the only terrestrial planet known to have an active hydrosphere. Terrestrial planets are substantially different from the ...