Solar System Essay

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Solar System D. Caicedo MDC Assignment 1: The Solar System The solar system consists of the Sun; the nine planets, 67 satellites of the planets and a large number of small bodies (comets and asteroids). The inner solar system contains the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars: The planets of the outer solar system are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto: The orbits of the planets are ellipses with the Sun at one focus, though all except Mercury and Pluto are very nearly circular. The orbits of the planets are all more or less in the same plane (called the ecliptic and defined by the plane of the Earth's orbit). The ecliptic is inclined only 7 degrees from the plane of the Sun's equator. Pluto's orbit deviates the most from the plane of the ecliptic with an inclination of 17 degrees. Below you see a diagram that show some relative information about most of the objects in our Solar System: Diameter (km) Moons Surface temp. Surface gravity Axial inclination Axial rotation The Sun 1 390 000 - 5800c - - 25 - 36 days Mercury 4 878 None 350c / -170c 0.38 0 58 days Venus 12 104 None 480c 0.9 178 243 days The Earth 12 756 1 20c 1 23.4 23h 56m Mars 6 787 None -23c 0.38 24 24h 37m Jupiter N/A 16 -150c 2.64 3.1 9h 50m Saturn 199 300 18 -180c 1.2 26.7 10h 39m Uranus 51 800 15 -210c 1.2 98 17h 10m Neptune 49 500 8 -220c 1.2 29.5 18h 24m Pluto 2 320 1 N/A 0.04 50 178 years The Moon 3 474 - 107c / -153c 0.17 1.5 27 days The Sun The sun is the most important part of our solar system. It is the biggest object and does have about 98% of the whole mass of the solar system. About 1,3 billion earths would fit inside the sun. The sun travels around the galaxy together with planets and other objects bound to it by gravitational forces. The largest of the bodies we call planets, most of which are in turn are orbited by smaller moons or

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