The Solar System formed 4. 6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of a giant interstellar molecular cloud. It is located in the Orion Arm, 26,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The solar wind, a stream of charged particles flowing outwards from the Sun, creates a bubble-like region in the interstellar medium known as the heliosphere.
About Solar System in brief
The Solar System is the gravitationally bound system of the Sun and the objects that orbit it, either directly or indirectly. The largest are the eight planets, with the remainder being smaller objects, the dwarf planets and small Solar System bodies. The Solar System formed 4. 6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of a giant interstellar molecular cloud. It is located in the Orion Arm, 26,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. For most of history, humanity did not recognize or understand the concept of the Solar System. Most people up to the Late Middle Ages–Renaissance believed Earth to be stationary at the centre of the universe and categorically different from the divine or ethereal objects that moved through the sky. The solar wind, a stream of charged particles flowing outwards from the Sun, creates a bubble-like region in the interstellar medium known as the heliosphere. The Oort cloud, which is thought to be the source for long-period comets, may also exist at a distance roughly a thousand times further than the heloosphere. In 1838, Friedrich Bessel successfully measured the position of a stellar parallax, providing the first direct proof of heliocentrism. Improvements in observational astronomy and the use of unceded spacecraft have enabled the detailed investigation of other bodies orbiting the Sun. The Sun is a G2-sequence star that contains the majority of the system’s known mass and it dominates it.
The two largest planets, Jupiter and Saturn, are gas giants, being composed mainly of hydrogen and helium; the two outermost planets, Uranus and Neptune, are ice giants. Six of the planets, the six largest possible dwarf planets, and many of the smaller bodies are orbited by natural satellites, usually termed ‘moons’ after the Moon. The only certain dwarf planet is Pluto, with another trans-Neptunian object, Eris, expected to be, and the asteroid Ceres at least close to being a dwarf planet. In addition to these two regions, various other small-body populations, including comets and centaurs and interplanetary dust clouds, freely travel between regions. The four outer planets are giant planets, being substantially more massive than the terrestrials. All eight planets have almost circular orbits that lie within a nearly flat disc called the ecliptic. The asteroid belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, mostly contains objects composed, like the terrestrial planets, of rock and metal. The heliopause is the point at which pressure from the solar wind is equal to the opposing pressure of the interstellarMedium; it extends out to the edge of the scattered disc. Each of the outer planets is encircled by planetary rings of dust and other small objects. The four smaller inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, are terrestrial planets,. This was the first evidence that anything other than the planets orbited the Sun in 1838.
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This page is based on the article Solar System published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 10, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
