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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 ...
Formation and evolution of the Solar System. Artist's conception of a protoplanetary disk. There is evidence that the formation of the Solar System began about 4.6 billion years ago with the gravitational collapse of a small part of a giant molecular cloud. [ 1] Most of the collapsing mass collected in the center, forming the Sun, while the ...
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]
Sun. The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a massive, nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy from its surface mainly as visible light and infrared radiation with 10% at ultraviolet energies.
Planetary science (or more rarely, planetology) is the scientific study of planets (including Earth ), celestial bodies (such as moons, asteroids, comets) and planetary systems (in particular those of the Solar System) and the processes of their formation. It studies objects ranging in size from micrometeoroids to gas giants, aiming to ...
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 our Solar System and the Moon ...
Solar System model. Solar System models, especially mechanical models, called orreries, that illustrate the relative positions and motions of the planets and moons in the Solar System have been built for centuries. While they often showed relative sizes, these models were usually not built to scale. The enormous ratio of interplanetary ...
The International Astronomical Union (IAU) defined in August 2006 that, in the Solar System, [ 1] a planet is a celestial body that: is in orbit around the Sun, has sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium (a nearly round shape), and. has "cleared the neighbourhood" around its orbit. A non- satellite body fulfilling only the first two ...