What Do We Know About Solar System

Other solar systems our milky way galaxy is just one of billions of galaxies in the universe.

What do we know about solar system.

A new discovery on a distant dwarf planet has astronomers rethinking the cosmic limits of our solar system. We can look at the oldest meteorites or the ones which show the most extreme lead ratios to try and estimate the age of the solar system. You might still think of the solar system as extending out to the orbit of the much loved dwarf planet pluto. Our solar system consists of our star the sun and everything bound to it by gravity the planets mercury venus earth mars jupiter saturn uranus and neptune dwarf planets such as pluto dozens of moons and millions of asteroids comets and meteoroids.

The world s greatest thinkers originally had the earth at the centre of creation with the sun moon planets and stars circling around us. It s an idea that lasted for more than 1 000 years dating back to the days of aristotle and ancient greece. Explore our solar system in depth 10 things to know about our solar system. The name earth is at least 1 000 years old.

The planetary system we call home is located in an outer spiral arm of the milky way galaxy. We get a figure of around 4 568 billion years if we do that. This means there are potentially thousands of planetary systems like our solar system within the galaxy. This is the first model that we know about that you start out with a pretty simple structure for the solar nebula from which planets form and end up with the giant planet system that we see.

Just slightly larger than nearby venus earth is the biggest of the four planets closest to the sun all of which are made of rock and metal. Our planetary system is the only one officially called solar system but astronomers have discovered more than 2 500 other stars with planets orbiting them in our galaxy. The edge of the solar system is 1 000 times farther away than pluto. Our solar system is just one specific planetary system a star with planets orbiting around it.

Within it there are at least 100 billion stars and on average each star has at least one planet orbiting it. That s just how many we ve found so far. The story of our quest to discover how our solar system formed is littered with false starts and one that astronomers are still refining. 10 need to know things about the solar system.