our solar system

Our Solar system:

Our Cosmic Neighborhood

From our small world we have looked upon the cosmic ocean for thousands of years. very old astronomers observed points of lightweight that emerged to move amidst the stars. They called these things "planets," significance wanderers, and named them after Roman deities—Jupiter, king of the gods; Mars, the god of war; Mercury, messenger of the gods; Venus, the goddes of love and attractiveness, and Saturn, father of Jupiter and god of agriculture. The stargazers furthermore discerned comets with sparkling tails, and meteors or shooting stars apparently dropping from the atmosphere.

Since the invention of the telescope, three more planets have been found out in our solar system: Uranus (1781), Neptune (1846), and, now downgraded to a dwarf planet, Pluto (1930). In supplement, there are thousands of small bodies such as asteroids and comets. Most of the asteroids orbit in a district between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, while the home of comets lies far beyond the orbit of Pluto, in the Oort Cloud.

The four planets nearest to the sun—Mercury, Venus, soil, and Mars—are called the terrestrial satellites because they have solid rocky surfaces. The four large satellites beyond the orbit of Mars—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—are called gas monsters. minute, distant, Pluto has a solid but icier surface than the terrestrial satellites.

almost every planet—and some of the moons—has an air. Earth's air is mainly nitrogen and oxygen. Venus has a broad air of carbon dioxide, with traces of venomous gases such as sulfur dioxide. Mars's carbon dioxide atmosphere is exceedingly slim. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are mainly hydrogen and helium. When Pluto is beside the sun, it has a slim air, but when Pluto journeys to the outside districts of its orbit, the atmosphere freezes and collapses to the planet's exterior. In that way, Pluto acts like a comet.

Moons, Rings, and Magnetospheres

There are 140 known natural satellites, furthermore called moons, in orbit round the diverse satellites in our solar scheme, extending from bodies larger than our own moon to small parts of debris.

From 1610 to 1977, Saturn was considered to be the only planet with rings. We now know that Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune furthermore have ring systems, although Saturn's is by far the biggest. Particles in these ring schemes range in size from dirt to boulders to house-size, and may be rocky and/or icy.

Most of the planets also have magnetic fields, which extend into space and pattern a magnetosphere round each planet. These magnetospheres rotate with the planet, clearing charged particles with them. The sun has a magnetic area, the heliosphere, which envelops our whole solar system.

very old astronomers accepted that the soil was the center of the cosmos, and that the sun and all the other stars rotated round the soil. Copernicus proved that soil and the other satellites in our solar scheme orbit our sun. Little by little, we are charting the cosmos, and an obvious question arises: Are there other satellites where life might exist? Only lately have astronomers had the tools to obscurely notice large satellites around other stars in close by solar systems.