Recent years have seen the discovery of several objects in stable orbits in the outer Solar System; these bodies include objects in the Kuiper belt (also known as the Kuiper–Edgeworth belt) as well as the Centaurs. Moreover, another region of orbital stability has been identified between the...
Early in the history of the Solar System, the giant planets — including Jupiter and Saturn — migrated under gravity into different orbits around the Sun, causing an epoch of chaos and collisions. Radioactive isotopes in asteroids record the thermal imprint of these collisions, and a broad surv...
The large mass of the sun produces an enormous gravitational pull that keeps all the planets of the solar system in their orbits. Even dwarf planet Pluto (formerly the ninth planet outright), which is six billion kilometers (3,728,227,153 miles) away, is kept in orbit by the sun. Plane...
Solar system - Formation, Planets, Orbits: The current approach to the origin of the solar system treats it as part of the general process of star formation. As observational information has steadily increased, the field of plausible models for this proc
effects on other objects in theKuiper Belt, a region at the fringe of the solar system that is home to icy rocks left over from the birth of the solar system. Also called trans-Neptunian objects, these Kuiper Belt objects have highly elliptical or oval orbits that align in the same ...
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will provide a unique tool to study moving objects throughout the solar system, creating massive catalogs of Near Earth Objects (NEOs), asteroids, Trojans, TransNeptunian Objects (TNOs), comets and planetary satellites with well-measured orbits and high ...
Solar system - Planets, Moons, Orbits: The eight planets can be divided into two distinct categories on the basis of their densities (mass per unit volume). The four inner, or terrestrial, planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—have rocky compositions
The space snowman known as 2014 MU69 or Ultima Thule added to its celebrity today by showing up on the cover of the journal Science, with the first
chapter. At the very least, it will find a ton more Kuiper Belt objects. But even if it doesn’t discover a single new object, it will be enough to confirm the Planet Nine hypothesis, because it will test all of the statistics, all of the patterns that we see with an independent ...
The solar system today has other surprises for us, on worlds we thought we already knew pretty well. Take Mercury, for example. It is the smallest planet, orbits close to the Sun, and has very little in the way of atmosphere. TheMESSENGERspacecraft sent back amazing images of the planet...