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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 remaining objects of the Solar System (including the four terrestrial planets, the dwarf planets, moons, asteroids, and comets) together comprise less than 0.002% of the Solar System's total mass. The Sun is composed of roughly 98% hydrogen and helium, as are Jupiter and Saturn.
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.
Formation and evolution of the Solar System. Artist's conception of a protoplanetary disk. 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 ...
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest in the Solar System.A gas giant, Jupiter's mass is more than two and a half times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined and slightly less than one one-thousandth the mass of the Sun. Jupiter orbits the Sun at a distance of 5.20 AU (778.5 Gm) with an orbital period of 11.86 years.
Giant planet. The four giant planets of the Solar System: ( top) Jupiter and Saturn ( gas giants) ( bottom) Uranus and Neptune ( ice giants) Shown in order from the Sun and in true color. Sizes are not to scale. A giant planet, sometimes referred to as a jovian planet ( Jove being another name for the Roman god Jupiter ), is a diverse type of ...
Eris ( minor-planet designation: 136199 Eris) is the most massive and second-largest known dwarf planet in the Solar System. [22] It is a trans-Neptunian object (TNO) in the scattered disk and has a high- eccentricity orbit. Eris was discovered in January 2005 by a Palomar Observatory –based team led by Mike Brown and verified later that year.
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 ...