Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Earth's rotation. Earth's rotation or Earth's spin is the rotation of planet Earth around its own axis, as well as changes in the orientation of the rotation axis in space. Earth rotates eastward, in prograde motion. As viewed from the northern polar star Polaris, Earth turns counterclockwise . The North Pole, also known as the Geographic North ...
720,000 km/h (450,000 mi/h) [ 10] Orbital period. ~230 million years [ 10] The Solar System[ d] is the gravitationally bound system of the Sun and the objects that orbit it. [ 11] It was formed about 4.6 billion years ago when a dense region of a molecular cloud collapsed, forming the Sun and a protoplanetary disc.
Ignoring the influence of other Solar System bodies, Earth's orbit, also called Earth's revolution, is an ellipse with the Earth–Sun barycenter as one focus with a current eccentricity of 0.0167. Since this value is close to zero, the center of the orbit is relatively close to the center of the Sun (relative to the size of the orbit).
Location of Earth. Logarithmic representation of the universe centered on the Solar System. Celestial bodies on this graphic are clickable and shown with their sizes enlarged. Knowledge of the location of Earth has been shaped by 400 years of telescopic observations, and has expanded radically since the start of the 20th century.
If the Earth-Moon system isn't engulfed by the enlarged Sun, the drag from the solar atmosphere can cause the orbit of the Moon to decay. Once the orbit of the Moon closes to a distance of 18,470 km (11,480 mi), it will cross Earth's Roche limit , meaning that tidal interaction with Earth would break apart the Moon, turning it into a ring system .
Earth formed around 4.54 billion years ago, approximately one-third the age of the universe, by accretion from the solar nebula. [ 4][ 5][ 6] Volcanic outgassing probably created the primordial atmosphere and then the ocean, but the early atmosphere contained almost no oxygen.
7th century BCE – Egyptian astronomers alleged to have predicted a solar eclipse. [citation needed] 613 BCE – A comet, possibly Comet Halley, is recorded in Spring and Autumn Annals by the Chinese. [ 9] 586 BCE – Thales of Miletus alleged to have predicted a solar eclipse. [ 10]
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest in the Solar System.It is a gas giant with a mass more than 2.5 times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined and slightly less than one-thousandth the mass of the Sun. Jupiter orbits the Sun at a distance of 5.20 AU (778.5 Gm), with an orbital period of 11.86 years.