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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
An artist's depiction of the hypothetical impact of a planet like Theia and the Earth. Theia (/ ˈ θ iː ə /) is a hypothesized ancient planet in the early Solar System which, according to the giant-impact hypothesis, collided with the early Earth around 4.5 billion years ago, with some of the resulting ejected debris coalescing to form the Moon.
For this reason (among others), the Solar System is chaotic in the technical sense defined by mathematical chaos theory, [1] and that chaotic behavior degrades even the most precise long-term numerical or analytic models for the orbital motion in the Solar System, so they cannot be valid beyond more than a few tens of millions of years into the ...
True-scale Solar System poster made by Emanuel Bowen in 1747. At that time, Uranus, Neptune, nor the asteroid belts had been discovered yet. Discovery and exploration of the Solar System is observation, visitation, and increase in knowledge and understanding of Earth's "cosmic neighborhood". [1]
A comet is an icy, small Solar System body that warms and begins to release gases when passing close to the Sun, a process called outgassing.This produces an extended, gravitationally unbound atmosphere or coma surrounding the nucleus, and sometimes a tail of gas and dust gas blown out from the coma.
Although many celestial bodies in the Solar System have a hydrosphere, Earth is the only celestial body known to have stable bodies of liquid water on its surface, with oceanic water covering 71% of its surface, [2] which is essential to life on Earth.
In the charted regions of the Solar System, these effects are negligible compared to the gravity of the Sun, but in the outer reaches of the system, the Sun's gravity is weaker and the gradient of the Milky Way's gravitational Galactic Center compresses it along the other two axes; these small perturbations can shift orbits in the Oort cloud to ...
[10] In another paper, based upon a lecture Kuiper gave in 1950, also called On the Origin of the Solar System, Kuiper wrote about the "outermost region of the solar nebula, from 38 to 50 astr. units (i.e., just outside proto-Neptune)" where "condensation products (ices of H20, NH3, CH4, etc.) must have formed, and the flakes must have slowly ...