Monday, January 21, 2008

What is Solar System?

Solar System has Sun and the other space objects gravitationally bound to it: the eight planets, their 162 known moonsthree presently known dwarf planets (including Pluto) and their four known moons, and billions of small bodies. This last group contains asteroids, Kuiper belt objects, comets, meteoroids and interplanetary dust.

In wide terms, the charted regions of the Solar System contains Sun, four terrestrial inner planets, an asteroid belt composed of small rocky bodies, four gas giant outer planets, and a second belt, called the Kuiper belt, collected of icy objects. Beyond the Kuiper belt lays the scattered disc, the heliopause, and finally the hypothetical Oort cloud.

In type of their distances from the Sun, the planets are Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Earth, Mars, Uranus, and Neptune. Six of the eight planets are in turn orbited by natural satellites, generally termed "moons" after Earth's Moon, and each of the outer planets is encircled by planetary rings of dust and added particles. All the planets apart from Earth are named after gods and goddesses from Greco-Roman mythology. The three dwarf planets are Pluto, the largest well-known Kuiper belt object; Ceres, the biggest object in the asteroid belt; and Eris, which lies in the scattered disc.

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