Solar system, assemblage consisting of the Sun—an average star in the Milky Way Galaxy—and those

bodies orbiting around it: 8 (formerly 9) planets with more than 210 known planetary satellites (moons);
many asteroids, some with their own satellites; comets and other icy bodies; and vast reaches of
highly tenuous gas and dust known as the interplanetary medium. The solar system is part of the
"observable universe," the region of space that humans can actually or theoretically observe with the aid
of technology. Unlike the observable universe, the universe is possibly infinite.

The Sun, Moon, and brightest planets were visible to the naked eyes of ancient astronomers, and their
observations and calculations of the movements of these bodies gave rise to the science of astronomy.
Today the amount of information on the motions, properties, and compositions of the planets and
smaller bodies has grown to immense proportions, and the range of observational instruments has
extended far beyond the solar system to other galaxies and the edge of the known universe. Yet the solar
system and its immediate outer boundary still represent the limit of our physical reach, and they remain
the core of our theoretical understanding of the cosmos as well. Earth-launched space probes and
landers have gathered data on planets, moons, asteroids, and other bodies, and this data has been
added to the measurements collected with telescopes and other instruments from below and above
Earth’s atmosphere and to the information extracted from meteorites and from Moon rocks returned by
astronauts. All this information is scrutinized in attempts to understand in detail the origin and evolution
of the solar system—a goal toward which astronomers continue to make great strides.

Composition of the solar system

orbits

The orbits of the planets and other bodies of the solar system.

Located at the centre of the solar system and influencing the motion of all the other bodies through
its gravitational force is the Sun, which in itself contains more than 99 percent of the mass of the system.
The planets, in order of their distance outward from the Sun,
are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Four planets—Jupiter through
Neptune—have ring systems, and all but Mercury and Venus have one or more moons. Pluto had been
officially listed among the planets since it was discovered in 1930 orbiting beyond Neptune, but in 1992
an icy object was discovered still farther from the Sun than Pluto. Many other such discoveries followed,
including an object named Eris that appears to be at least as large as Pluto. It became apparent that
Pluto was simply one of the larger members of this new group of objects, collectively known as
the Kuiper belt. Accordingly, in August 2006 the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the organization
charged by the scientific community with classifying astronomical objects, voted to revoke Pluto’s
planetary status and place it under a new classification called dwarf planet. For a discussion of that
action and of the definition of planet approved by the IAU, see planet.
Understand the relative size of the Sun, the Moon, and other solar system objects

Learn about the comparative size of various solar system objects.

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Any natural solar system object other than the Sun, a planet, a dwarf planet, or a moon is called a small
body; these include asteroids, meteoroids, and comets. Most of the more than one million asteroids, or
minor planets, orbit between Mars and Jupiter in a nearly flat ring called the asteroid belt.
The myriad fragments of asteroids and other small pieces of solid matter (smaller than a few tens of
metres across) that populate interplanetary space are often termed meteoroids to distinguish them from
the larger asteroidal bodies.

The solar system’s several billion comets are found mainly in two distinct reservoirs. The more-distant
one, called the Oort cloud, is a spherical shell surrounding the solar system at a distance of
approximately 50,000 astronomical units (AU)—more than 1,000 times the distance of Pluto’s orbit. The
other reservoir, the Kuiper belt, is a thick disk-shaped zone whose main concentration extends 30–50 AU
from the Sun, beyond the orbit of Neptune but including a portion of the orbit of Pluto. (One
astronomical unit is the average distance from Earth to the Sun—about 150 million km [93 million
miles].) Just as asteroids can be regarded as rocky debris left over from the formation of the inner
planets, Pluto, its moon Charon, Eris, and the myriad other Kuiper belt objects can be seen as surviving
representatives of the icy bodies that accreted to form the cores of Neptune and Uranus. As such, Pluto
and Charon may also be considered to be very large comet nuclei. The Centaur objects, a population of
comet nuclei having diameters as large as 200 km (125 miles), orbit the Sun between Jupiter and
Neptune, probably having been gravitationally perturbed inward from the Kuiper belt.
The interplanetary medium—an exceedingly tenuous plasma (ionized gas) laced with concentrations
of dust particles—extends outward from the Sun to about 123 AU.

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The solar system even contains objects from interstellar space that are just passing through. Two
such interstellar objects have been observed. ‘Oumuamua had an unusual cigarlike or pancakelike shape
and was possibly composed of nitrogen ice. Comet Borisov was much like the comets of the solar system
but with a much higher abundance of carbon monoxide.

Orbits

solar system to scale

The eight planets of the solar system and Pluto, in a montage of images scaled to show the approximate
sizes of the bodies relative to one another. Outward from the Sun, which is represented to scale by the
yellow segment at the extreme left, are the four rocky terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and
Mars), the four hydrogen-rich giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune), and icy,
comparatively tiny Pluto.(more)

All the planets and dwarf planets, the rocky asteroids, and the icy bodies in the Kuiper belt move around
the Sun in elliptical orbits in the same direction that the Sun rotates. This motion is termed prograde, or
direct, motion. Looking down on the system from a vantage point above Earth’s North Pole, an observer
would find that all these orbital motions are in a counterclockwise direction. In striking contrast, the
comet nuclei in the Oort cloud are in orbits having random directions, corresponding to their spherical
distribution around the plane of the planets.

The shape of an object’s orbit is defined in terms of its eccentricity. For a perfectly circular orbit, the
eccentricity is 0; with increasing elongation of the orbit’s shape, the eccentricity increases toward a value
of 1, the eccentricity of a parabola. Of the eight major planets, Venus and Neptune have the most
circular orbits around the Sun, with eccentricities of 0.007 and 0.009, respectively. Mercury, the closest
planet, has the highest eccentricity, with 0.21; the dwarf planet Pluto, with 0.25, is even more eccentric.
Another defining attribute of an object’s orbit around the Sun is its inclination, which is the angle that it
makes with the plane of Earth’s orbit—the ecliptic plane. Again, of the planets, Mercury’s has the
greatest inclination, its orbit lying at 7° to the ecliptic; Pluto’s orbit, by comparison, is much more steeply
inclined, at 17.1°. The orbits of the small bodies generally have both higher eccentricities and higher
inclinations than those of the planets. Some comets from the Oort cloud have inclinations greater than
90°; their motion around the Sun is thus opposite that of the Sun’s rotation, or retrograde.

Planets and their moons

The eight planets can be divided into two distinct categories on the basis of their densities (mass per unit
volume). The four inner, or terrestrial, planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—have
rocky compositions and densities greater than 3 grams per cubic cm. (Water has a density of 1 gram per
cubic cm.) In contrast, the four outer planets, also called the Jovian, or giant, planets—
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—are large objects with densities less than 2 grams per cubic cm;
they are composed primarily of hydrogen and helium (Jupiter and Saturn) or of ice, rock, hydrogen, and
helium (Uranus and Neptune). The dwarf planet Pluto is unique—an icy, low-density body smaller than
Earth’s Moon, more similar to comets or to the large icy moons of the outer planets than to any of the
planets themselves. Its acceptance as a member of the Kuiper belt explains these anomalies.

The relatively small inner planets have solid surfaces, lack ring systems, and have few or no moons. The
atmospheres of Venus, Earth, and Mars are composed of a significant percentage of
oxidized compounds such as carbon dioxide. Among the inner planets, only Earth has a strong magnetic
field, which shields it from the interplanetary medium. The magnetic field traps some of the electrically
charged particles of the interplanetary medium inside a region around Earth known as
the magnetosphere. Heavy concentrations of these high-energy particles occur in the Van Allen belts in
the inner part of the magnetosphere.

Jovian planets

The Jovian—or gaseous, Jupiter-like—planets.

The four giant outer planets are much more massive than the terrestrial planets and have immense
atmospheres composed mainly of hydrogen and helium. They have no solid surfaces, however, and their
densities are so low that one of them, Saturn, would actually float in water. Each of the outer planets has
a magnetic field, a ring system, and many known moons, with more likely to be discovered. Pluto has no
known rings and only five known moons. Several other Kuiper belt objects and some asteroids also have
moons of their own.

Most of the known moons move around their respective planets in the same direction that the planets
orbit the Sun. They are extremely diverse, representing a wide range of environments. Jupiter is orbited
by Io, a body wracked by intense volcanism, while Saturn’s largest moon, Titan—a body larger than the
terrestrial planet Mercury—exhibits a primitive atmosphere denser than that of Earth. Triton moves in
a retrograde orbit around Neptune—that is, opposite to the direction of the planet’s orbit around the
Sun—and features plumes of material rising through its tenuous atmosphere from a surface whose
temperature is only 37 kelvins (K; −393 °F, −236 °C).