How many planets are in our solar system?

PLANETS

Hurtling around the Sun are eight planets. Those closest to the Sun – Mercury, Venus, our home planet Earth, and Mars – are made of rock. The vast outer planets – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune – are called “gas planets” because all we see of them is their gas. All eight travel in the same direction around the Sun. The time taken to make one circuit, or orbit, increases with distance. Mercury takes just 88 Earth days to orbit, while Neptune’s longer journey takes 164.8 Earth years.

  1. JUPITER: The largest and most massive planet, Jupiter is also the fastest spinner, rotating once on its own axis in less than 10 hours. This giant world is made mainly of hydrogen and helium, with a central rocky core. A thin faint ring encircles Jupiter, which also has a large family of moons.
  2. SATURN: Sixth from the Sun, and second largest, is pale yellow Saturn. Its distinctive feature is its ring system, which is made of billions of pieces of dirty water ice. Saturn is mainly hydrogen and helium with a rocky core. It has a large family of moons.
  3. URANUS: Nineteen times the distance of Earth from the Sun, Uranus is a cold, turquoise world bounded by a layer of haze. A sparse ring system encircles the planet’s equator. Uranus is tilted on its side, so that its rings and moons seem to orbit it from top to bottom.
  4. MERCURY: Mercury is a dry ball of rock, covered by millions of impact craters. It is the smallest planet, the closest to the Sun, and has the widest temperature range of any planet. During the day it is baking hot, but at night it is freezing cold.
  5. VENUS: Second from the Sun, Venus is the hottest planet. This rock world is permanently covered by thick cloud that traps heat and makes it a gloomy planet.
  6. NEPTUNE: Neptune is the most distant, coldest, and windiest of all eight planets. Like Uranus, it is made mainly of water-, methane-, and ammonia ices with an atmosphere of hydrogen- rich gas. It is encircled by a thin ring system and has a family of moons.
  7. MARS: Sometimes called the “red planet”, Mars is the outermost of the rocky planets and a cold, dry world. It has polar ice caps, giant volcanoes, frozen desert, and deep canyons, formed in the distant past. Mars has also two small moons.
  8. EARTH: The only place known to have life is Earth, the largest of the rocky planets and third from the Sun. It is also the only planet with liquid water. Movements in Earth’s crust are constantly changing its surface. Earth has one moon.
  9. DWARF PLANETS: The Solar System has five known dwarf planets – small, roundish objects that orbit the Sun amongst other objects. Ceres orbits between Mars and Jupiter within a belt of rocky asteroids, while Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris are icy worlds that orbit beyond Neptune in a region called the Kuiper Belt.

PLANET SCALES Jupiter, fifth planet from the Sun, is much larger than all the other planets. It measures 142,984 km (88,846 miles) across and is made of about two and a half times as much material as all the other planets put, together. The seven other planets and the dwarf planets are shown here roughly to scale.

Picture Credit : Google

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