The Solar System

An Overview of the Sun, Planets, and Worlds Beyond

A General Reference Guide

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to the Solar System

2. The Sun
3. Mercury
4. Venus
5. Earth and the Moon
6. Mars
7. The Asteroid Belt
8. Jupiter
9. Saturn
10. Uranus
11. Neptune
12. Dwarf Planets and the Kuiper Belt
13. Comets, Meteors, and the Oort Cloud
14. Exploring the Solar System
15. Glossary of Key Terms
16. Frequently Asked Questions
17. Timeline of Solar System Exploration
18. Appendix: One Hundred Quick Facts
1. Introduction to the Solar System
The Solar System is the gravitationally bound family of objects that orbit
the Sun. It formed roughly 4.6 billion years ago from a huge, slowly
rotating cloud of gas and dust known as the solar nebula. Under the pull of
its own gravity, this cloud began to collapse and flatten into a spinning
disk. Most of the material gathered at the center to form the Sun, while the
rest cooled and clumped together to form the planets, moons, asteroids,
and comets we know today.

At the center of it all sits the Sun, a middle-aged star that accounts for
more than ninety-nine percent of the mass in the entire system. Its gravity
is the anchor that keeps everything else in orbit, from the scorched, rocky
world of Mercury less than forty million miles away to icy bodies drifting
more than a light-year out in the distant Oort Cloud.

Astronomers generally divide the eight recognized planets into two broad
families. The inner four -- Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars -- are called
terrestrial or rocky planets. They are relatively small, dense, and built
mostly from metal and rock. The outer four -- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and
Neptune -- are the giant planets. Jupiter and Saturn are gas giants,
composed overwhelmingly of hydrogen and helium, while Uranus and
Neptune are sometimes called ice giants because a larger share of their
mass is made up of heavier volatile compounds such as water, ammonia,
and methane.

A Sense of Scale
One of the hardest things to appreciate about the Solar System is just how
empty it is. If the Sun were shrunk to the size of a basketball, Earth would
be a peppercorn orbiting about twenty-six meters away, and Neptune
would be a pinhead nearly a kilometer from that basketball. The planets
themselves are tiny compared to the vast stretches of space between
them.

Distances in the Solar System are usually measured in astronomical units,

or AU, where one AU is the average distance between Earth and the Sun
-- about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers. Using this yardstick,
Mercury orbits at roughly 0.39 AU, while Neptune, the outermost official
planet, orbits at about 30 AU. Beyond Neptune, the Kuiper Belt and the
theorized Oort Cloud stretch the practical boundary of the Sun's influence
out to perhaps 100,000 AU or more.

How the Planets Move

Every planet in the Solar System orbits the Sun in the same direction and
in almost the same flat plane, a leftover signature of the spinning disk from
which they all formed. Most planets also rotate on their axis in that same
direction, though a few exceptions -- most notably Venus, which spins
backward, and Uranus, which spins almost on its side -- hint at violent
collisions or gravitational upsets earlier in the system's history.

This guide moves outward from the Sun, world by world, before turning to
comets, asteroids, and the small icy bodies that lie far beyond Neptune's
orbit. Along the way it touches on the missions that have carried human
eyes and instruments to these distant places, and closes with a broad set
of quick reference facts.
2. The Sun
The Sun is a yellow dwarf star, a fairly ordinary member of a class of stars
called G-type main-sequence stars. It is about 4.6 billion years old and is
expected to keep shining in its current form for roughly another five billion
years. With a diameter of about 864,000 miles, more than a million Earths
could fit inside its volume.

The Sun generates its energy through nuclear fusion. Deep within its core,
where temperatures reach about 15 million degrees Celsius and
pressures are immense, hydrogen nuclei are fused together to form
helium. This process releases a tremendous amount of energy, which
slowly works its way outward over hundreds of thousands of years before
finally escaping from the surface as light and heat.

Layers of the Sun

The Sun is often described in layers. At its center is the core, where fusion
takes place. Surrounding that is the radiative zone, where energy moves
outward extremely slowly as photons are absorbed and re-emitted over
and over. Above that sits the convective zone, where hot plasma
physically rises and falls like water boiling in a pot, carrying heat the rest of
the way to the surface.

The visible surface of the Sun is called the photosphere, and it is this layer
that gives the Sun its familiar bright disk. Above the photosphere lies the
chromosphere, and beyond that the corona, a faint, extremely hot outer
atmosphere that becomes visible to the naked eye only during a total solar
eclipse. Strangely, the corona is far hotter than the surface below it, a
puzzle that solar physicists are still working to fully explain.

Solar Activity
The Sun's surface is not static. Dark, cooler patches called sunspots come
and go in an eleven-year cycle, marking areas of intense magnetic activity.
These regions can erupt in solar flares and coronal mass ejections,
sudden bursts of radiation and charged particles that can trigger auroras
on Earth and, in extreme cases, disrupt satellites and power grids.

Without the Sun's steady output of light and heat, life on Earth as we know
it would be impossible. Nearly every ecosystem on the planet depends,
directly or indirectly, on sunlight for its energy.
3. Mercury
Mercury is the smallest planet in the Solar System and the closest to the
Sun, orbiting at an average distance of about 36 million miles. It completes
one trip around the Sun in just 88 Earth days, giving it the shortest year of
any planet, yet it rotates so slowly that a single day on Mercury -- from one
sunrise to the next -- lasts about 176 Earth days.

Because it has almost no atmosphere to trap heat, Mercury experiences

the most extreme temperature swings of any planet. Daytime
temperatures can soar past 800 degrees Fahrenheit, while nighttime
temperatures can plunge to nearly minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit.

Surface and Structure

Mercury's surface closely resembles that of Earth's Moon, covered in
impact craters built up over billions of years with little erosion to wear them
down. One of its most striking features is the Caloris Basin, a massive
impact crater more than 900 miles across, created by an ancient collision
with an asteroid or comet.

Despite its small size, Mercury has a surprisingly large iron core that
makes up much of its interior, giving the planet a density almost as high as
Earth's. Scientists believe that early collisions may have stripped away
much of Mercury's outer rocky layers, leaving the metallic core to
dominate what remains.

Exploration
Mercury has been visited by only two NASA spacecraft: Mariner 10, which
flew by three times in the mid-1970s, and MESSENGER, which orbited the
planet from 2011 to 2015 and mapped its surface in detail. The European
and Japanese space agencies launched a joint mission called
BepiColombo in 2018 to study Mercury further, with orbital operations
expected in the years following its arrival.
4. Venus
Venus is often called Earth's twin because of its similar size and rocky
composition, but the resemblance ends there. It is the hottest planet in the
Solar System, with a surface temperature of roughly 870 degrees
Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt lead. This extreme heat comes from a
runaway greenhouse effect: Venus's thick atmosphere, made almost
entirely of carbon dioxide, traps solar heat so effectively that surface
temperatures stay scorching day and night, on every part of the planet.

The atmospheric pressure at Venus's surface is about ninety times that of

Earth, similar to the crushing pressure found nearly a kilometer beneath
Earth's oceans. Thick clouds of sulfuric acid circle the planet at high
altitude, adding to its hostile reputation.

Rotation and Orbit

Venus has one of the strangest rotations of any planet. It spins on its axis
backward compared to most other planets, and it does so extremely slowly
-- a single day on Venus lasts about 243 Earth days, which is longer than
its year of about 225 Earth days. In other words, a Venusian day is longer
than a Venusian year.

Surface Features
Radar mapping, most notably by NASA's Magellan spacecraft in the early
1990s, has revealed a surface hidden beneath Venus's thick clouds. It
shows vast volcanic plains, thousands of volcanoes, and a small number
of highland regions such as Ishtar Terra and Aphrodite Terra that