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Currently most of the objects of mass between 10 9 kg to 10 12 kg (less than 1000 teragrams (Tg)) listed here are near-Earth asteroids (NEAs). The Aten asteroid 1994 WR12 has less mass than the Great Pyramid of Giza, 5.9 × 10 9 kg. For more about very small objects in the Solar System, see meteoroid, micrometeoroid, cosmic dust, and ...
The outermost region of the Solar System is the theorized Oort cloud, the source for long-period comets, extending to a radius of 2,000–200,000 astronomical units (0.032–3.2 light-years). The closest star to the Solar System, Proxima Centauri, is 4.25 light-years (269,000 AU) away.
Contents. Formation and evolution of the Solar System. There is evidence that the formation of the Solar System began about 4.6 billion years ago with the gravitational collapse of a small part of a giant molecular cloud. [1] Most of the collapsing mass collected in the center, forming the Sun, while the rest flattened into a protoplanetary ...
Alpha Centauri – star system nearest to the Solar System, at about 4.4 light years away; Solar System – star and planetary system where the Earth is located. Earth – the only planet known to have life. Structure and composition of the Solar System. Interplanetary space; Physical characteristics of the Sun Structure of the Sun. Solar core ...
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second-largest in the Solar System, after Jupiter. It is a gas giant with an average radius of about nine-and-a-half times that of Earth. [26] [27] It has only one-eighth the average density of Earth, but is over 95 times more massive.
The first human to walk on the surface of another Solar System body was Neil Armstrong, who stepped onto the Moon on July 21, 1969 during the Apollo 11 mission; five more Moon landings occurred through 1972. The United States' reusable Space Shuttle flew 135 missions between 1981 and 2011. Two of the five shuttles were destroyed in accidents.
90377 Sedna. Sedna ( minor-planet designation: 90377 Sedna) is a dwarf planet in the outermost reaches of the Solar System, orbiting the Sun beyond the orbit of Neptune. Discovered in 2003, the planetoid's surface is one of the reddest known among Solar System bodies. Spectroscopy has revealed Sedna's surface to be mostly a mixture of the solid ...
NASA’s Galileo spacecraft caught a volcano erupting on IO.NASA. Io, the third-largest moon of Jupiter, is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. “The eruptions are so big that ...