How Big is the Solar System?
It is a whole new solar system (an estimate 19 trillion miles) to explore and study! There are three scales to which the solar system can be divided into. The first is the inner planets, followed by the outer planets, and lastly the oort cloud.
Inner planets
The inner planets comprises of Mercury, Mars, Earth, and Mars. All four are terrestrial planets with solid spheres of rock and metallic cores. Because they form close to the young sun, the tremendous heart of creation evaporated their gases, leaving dense airless planets.
Newly designated dwarf planet, Ceres is the largest of the million plus rocky bodies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists were recently surprised to discover three comets orbiting within the asteroid belts. They appeared to have formed there rather than the outer solar system beyond the planet Neptune. Since they contain water ice, it is possible that such asteroids comets brought water to Earth.
Outer Planets
Born in the cooler parts of the swirling nebula from which the sun emerged, gas giants Jupiter and Saturn swept up stupendous amounts of Hydrogen and Helium. The Planet Uranus and Neptune on the other hand have no solid surface and are ice giants comprising of largely water and ice. Dwarf planets Pluto and Eris reside in the Kuiper belt.
The Kuiper belt is a realm of rocky, and icy bodies whose existence was confirmed in 1992. Sedna, discovered in 2003 is a sphere smaller than Pluto and is now regarded as the most distant solar object ever seen.
Oort Cloud
The oort cloud is never ever directly observed but is thought to surround the system about 19 trillion miles away from the sun. All these parts coalesced from the material thrown off during the birth of our star 4.6 billion years ago.
~
_____________________________________________________________
jamesesz
Recent Comments