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Venus rotates clockwise, and Uranus has been knocked on its side and rotates almost perpendicular to the rest of the Solar System. The ecliptic remains within 3° of the invariable plane over five million years, [2] but is now inclined about 23.44° to Earth's celestial equator used for the coordinates of poles. This large inclination means ...
The average distance between Neptune and the Sun is 4.5 billion km (about 30.1 astronomical units (AU), the mean distance from the Earth to the Sun), and it completes an orbit on average every 164.79 years, subject to a variability of around ±0.1 years. The perihelion distance is 29.81 AU, and the aphelion distance is 30.33 AU.
[j] Also, with a diameter 5.5% that of Neptune, it is the largest moon of a gas giant relative to its planet in terms of diameter, although Titan is bigger relative to Saturn in terms of mass (the ratio of Triton's mass to that of Neptune is approximately 1:4788). It has a radius, density (2.061 g/cm 3), temperature, and chemical composition ...
The bright S/2002 N5 moon is 14 miles (23 kilometers) in diameter and takes nearly nine years to complete an orbit of Neptune, while faint S/2021 N1 is about 8.7 miles (14 kilometers) across and ...
Other resonances also exist at 3:4, 3:5, 4:7, and 2:5. [26]: 104 Neptune has a number of trojan objects, which occupy its Lagrangian points, gravitationally stable regions leading and trailing it in its orbit. Neptune trojans are in a 1:1 mean-motion resonance with Neptune and often have very stable orbits.
In gravitationally bound systems, the orbital speed of an astronomical body or object (e.g. planet, moon, artificial satellite, spacecraft, or star) is the speed at which it orbits around either the barycenter (the combined center of mass) or, if one body is much more massive than the other bodies of the system combined, its speed relative to the center of mass of the most massive body.
Most of the material orbits and rotates in one direction. This uniformity of motion is due to the collapse of a gas cloud. [1] The nature of the collapse is explained by conservation of angular momentum. In 2010 the discovery of several hot Jupiters with backward orbits called into question the theories about the formation of planetary systems. [2]
In astronomy, the rotation period or spin period [1] of a celestial object (e.g., star, planet, moon, asteroid) has two definitions. The first one corresponds to the sidereal rotation period (or sidereal day ), i.e., the time that the object takes to complete a full rotation around its axis relative to the background stars ( inertial space ).