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Analysis of our Solar System

On a hot summer night, as you are sitting outside enjoying the evening, you tilt your head back and look into the night sky. You begin to wonder what is really out there? How far away are the stars? Are they stars or are they planets?

We live in a part of the night sky called the ¡§Milky Way Galaxy.¡¨ Our galaxy can be seen with the naked eye on a clear summer night. It resembles a ribbon stretched across the night sky. During the summer is when the Milky Way is at its fullest with the stars so clustered together they look like one white mass.

Our galaxy is a gigantic agglomeration of stars and planets whose numbers will probably never been known. Currently we estimate this number to be about thirty billion. Scientists have estimated that the radius of our galaxy if it were to be traveled, would take us about fifty thousand light years and the thickness to be about fifteen to twenty light years.

We live in small part of the Milky Way Galaxy, which is referred to as a solar system. Our solar system is made up of nine planets and 31 moons, which orbit the center of galaxy. At the center of our galaxy is our Sun, which is approximately twenty-five thousand light years from our solar system.

These nine major planets in order from the center are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.

Mercury is the planet nearest to the Sun. As it orbits the Sun, it does not rotate, keeping the same face of the planet toward the Sun at all times. This means that one side of the planet has a continual burning day of 900„a F, and the other side a continual night and a deadly cold of 450„a F below zero. Mercury is the fastest traveling of the nine planets making one full orbit around the Sun in only eight days. Life on mercury would be impossible. If you could live where the night meets the day and survive the...