<p align="right">Last Update: <font color="#4f81bd">January 07, 2025</font></p> ## BIG IDEAS - Earth is a planet in our solar system. - Our solar system is made up of the Sun (a [[Stars|star]]), the planets and their moons, and countless smaller objects that include rocky asteroids and icy comets. - Our solar system belongs to the huge, disk-shaped collection of stars called the Milky Way Galaxy ### Definition A solar system comprises a star and all the celestial objects bound to it by gravity, including planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and meteoroids. ### Main Objects - **The Sun**: The central star and the most massive object. - **Planets**: Eight in total - Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. - **Dwarf Planets**: Including Pluto, Eris, Haumea, Makemake, and Ceres. - **Moons**: Natural satellites orbiting planets, like Earth's Moon, Jupiter's Ganymede, and Saturn's Titan. - **Asteroids**: Mostly found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. - **Comets**: Icy bodies that release gas and dust, forming tails when close to the Sun. - **Meteoroids**: Small rocky or metallic bodies in space. - **Kuiper Belt Objects**: Beyond Neptune, home to many dwarf planets and comets. - **Oort Cloud**: A distant, spherical shell of icy objects surrounding our solar system. >[!note] Fun Fact >Jupiter is so massive that it doesn’t orbit the Sun in a perfect circle. Instead, both the Sun and Jupiter orbit a point in space just outside the Sun's surface due to their gravitational interactions. This point is called the barycenter. > ### Total Mass The total mass of the entire solar system is $1.989 \times 10^{30} \ kg$ ### The sun The sun is 99.86% of the mass of the entire solar system. Jupiter is 0.095% of the entire mass. This means the mass of the Earth and everyone on it is a rounding error on the mass of the Sun. >[!info] 1992 > The second solar system discovered, after our own, was around the pulsar PSR B1257+12 in 1992. This discovery included multiple planets orbiting the pulsar. ### Video <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/libKVRa01L8?si=_g4NXbUeH79jj0kH" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> ### Slide Deck <div style="position: relative; width: 100%; height: 0; padding-top: 56.2500%; padding-bottom: 0; box-shadow: 0 2px 8px 0 rgba(63,69,81,0.16); margin-top: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 0.9em; overflow: hidden; border-radius: 8px; will-change: transform;"> <iframe loading="lazy" style="position: absolute; width: 100%; height: 100%; top: 0; left: 0; border: none; padding: 0;margin: 0;" src="https://www.canva.com/design/DAGaEN8yDD4/UAoS6msv9RAYS9UmilmVAw/view?embed" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" allow="fullscreen"> </iframe> </div> ### Related Topics --- [[Home|Home]] | [[The Universe]] | [[The Big Bang|The Big Bang Theory]] | [[Solar System]] | [[Galaxies]] | [[Star Clusters]] | [[Superclusters]] | [[Black Holes]]