Giants Orbiting Planets

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Saturday, June 27th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed

We have a special feeling toward the other planets that circle our sun. Maybe it’s all the science Fiction stories about visiting the moon, Mars and other planets. But we love to consider those planets that make up what we call “the solar system.” that do what our planet does but do it very differently indeed.

The planets of our solar system have taken on personalities and mythical appeal in our literature and humanities. It is easy to find artists who render their vision of the planets that make up our society of planets near our sun. The names of the planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are all from our cultural past being gods from Greek and Roman mythology. But the solar system is not just made of these planets. The solar system is a very busy place indeed.

In 2006, there was quite a lot of debate as scholars and astronomers agreed to downgrade Pluto and remove its standing as a planet. So you have to wonder, what’s it that makes something a planet and what happened to Pluto? It did not just depart so it must still be out there. A planet, by systematic definition is any object in orbit around a sun, that has formed into some type of round object is a planet as long as it has cleared away any other orbiting items around it. By cleared away, that doesn’t suggest it has destroyed all space waste For example, our planet hasn’t “cleared away” the moon but it is caught it into its own classify as a planet. That is a relief huh?

There are a lot of objects wafting around in our solar system aside from the planets we know of. It is a fascinating piece of trivialities that as well as the planets there are 165 moons orbiting around those nine planets. Some of those moons are so advanced that some scientists have suspected that they might have supported life at some point.

In addition to the regular planets and moons, there are dwarf planets, asteroid belts and routine visits by comets that make lots of traffic in our cosmic corner of the universe. The 2 known dwarf planets that exist on the outer rim of our solar system are Eries and Ceres. So when Pluto’s status was modified to be removed from the list of planets, it simply joined those 2 bodies as dwarf planets but still a solid voter of the community of astronomical bodies around our sun.

In addition to these larger bodies, there is an asteroid belt that exists between Mars and Jupiter that almost all of the asteroids that we see in our night sky come from. There’s another belt of large objects further out called the Kuiper belt as well as a “bubble” in space called a heliopause and there is a suspected additional belt outside the known solar system called the Oort belt that we think is the origin of a ton of huge asteroids and comets that frequent our solar system and come to orbit our sun.

As fascinating as these many astronomical bodies who are our neighbors in space is the origin of our solar system. We must break it down to easy terms to simple terms to comprehend we know the early history of the early history of the solar system and the universe was one of great bodies of gas and clouds of matter eventually cooling and heating, exploding and spinning off stars and other great space giants that became more stars, galaxies and solar systems. It was from this erratic activity that our sun separated from the gasses and carried with it the material that became our solar system. The gravity of the sun caught satisfactory matter that it began to go thru the method of forming, cooling, exploding and separating. This is what occurred as the planets all went thru he same process eventually establishing stable orbits and tiny objects falling into orbit around them.

When you think of how strong and beyond control this process is, it’s fantastic to step back and see the great thing about the organization of our solar system today. The more detail you study the history of our solar system, the more you will enjoy your explorations of the planets with your telescope. That that discovery is part of the fun of astronomy.

Visit planet-facts.com for more information about planets and our solar system. Along the way, check out Saturn interesting facts.

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