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The Solar System travels alone through the Milky Way in a circular orbit approximately 30,000 light years from the Galactic Center. Its speed is about 220 km/s. The period required for the Solar System to complete one revolution around the Galactic Center, the galactic year, is in the range of 220–250 million years. Since its formation, the ...
The history of scientific thought about the formation and evolution of the Solar System began with the Copernican Revolution. The first recorded use of the term " Solar System " dates from 1704. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Since the seventeenth century, philosophers and scientists have been forming hypotheses concerning the origins of the Solar System and the ...
The Solar System remains in a relatively stable, slowly evolving state by following isolated, gravitationally bound orbits around the Sun. [28] Although the Solar System has been fairly stable for billions of years, it is technically chaotic, and may eventually be disrupted. There is a small chance that another star will pass through the Solar ...
The term "Solar System" entered the English language by 1704, when John Locke used it to refer to the Sun, planets, and comets as a whole. [82] By then it had been established beyond doubt that planets are other worlds, and stars are other distant suns, so the whole Solar System is actually only a small part of an immensely large universe, and ...
Solar System This page was last edited on 30 May 2014, at 01:10 (UTC) . Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License ; additional terms may apply.
This is the boundary of the Solar System to interstellar space. The outermost region of the Solar System is the theorized Oort cloud, the source for long-period comets, extending to a radius of 2,000–200,000 AU. The closest star to the Solar System, Proxima Centauri, is 4.25 light-years (269,000 AU) away.
The Solar System has been relatively well-studied, initially through telescopes and then later by spacecraft. This has provided a good overall understanding of the formation and evolution of the Sun's planetary system, although many new discoveries are still being made. [110]
The Big Bang theory, which explains the Evolution of the Universe from a hot and dense state, is widely accepted by physicists.. In astronomy, cosmogony is the study of the origin of particular astrophysical objects or systems, and is most commonly used in reference to the origin of the universe, the Solar System, or the Earth–Moon system.