Solar System
The Solar System is the gravitationally bound planetary system of the Sun and the objects that orbit it, either directly or indirectly. Of the objects that orbit the Sun directly, the largest are the eight planets, with the remainder being smaller objects, such as the five dwarf planets and small Solar System bodies. Of the objects that orbit the Sun indirectly—the moons—two are larger than the smallest planet, Mercury; the Solar System formed 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of a giant interstellar molecular cloud. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun, with the majority of the remaining mass contained in Jupiter; the four smaller inner planets, Venus and Mars, are terrestrial planets, being composed of rock and metal. The four outer planets are giant planets, being more massive than the terrestrials; the two largest and Saturn, are gas giants, being composed of hydrogen and helium. All eight planets have circular orbits that lie within a nearly flat disc called the ecliptic.
The Solar System contains smaller objects. The asteroid belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter contains objects composed, like the terrestrial planets, of rock and metal. Beyond Neptune's orbit lie the Kuiper belt and scattered disc, which are populations of trans-Neptunian objects composed of ices, beyond them a newly discovered population of sednoids. Within these populations are several dozen to tens of thousands of objects large enough that they have been rounded by their own gravity; such objects are categorized as dwarf planets. Identified dwarf planets include the trans-Neptunian objects Pluto and Eris. In addition to these two regions, various other small-body populations, including comets and interplanetary dust clouds travel between regions. Six of the planets, at least four of the dwarf planets, many of the smaller bodies are orbited by natural satellites termed "moons" after the Moon; each of the outer planets is encircled by planetary rings of dust and other small objects.
The solar wind, a stream of charged particles flowing outwards from the Sun, creates a bubble-like region in the interstellar medium known as the heliosphere. The heliopause is the point at which pressure from the solar wind is equal to the opposing pressure of the interstellar medium; the Oort cloud, thought to be the source for long-period comets, may exist at a distance a thousand times further than the heliosphere. The Solar System is located in the Orion Arm, 26,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. For most of history, humanity did not understand the concept of the Solar System. Most people up to the Late Middle Ages–Renaissance believed Earth to be stationary at the centre of the universe and categorically different from the divine or ethereal objects that moved through the sky. Although the Greek philosopher Aristarchus of Samos had speculated on a heliocentric reordering of the cosmos, Nicolaus Copernicus was the first to develop a mathematically predictive heliocentric system.
In the 17th century, Galileo discovered that the Sun was marked with sunspots, that Jupiter had four satellites in orbit around it. Christiaan Huygens followed on from Galileo's discoveries by discovering Saturn's moon Titan and the shape of the rings of Saturn. Edmond Halley realised in 1705 that repeated sightings of a comet were recording the same object, returning once every 75–76 years; this was the first evidence that anything other than the planets orbited the Sun. Around this time, the term "Solar System" first appeared in English. In 1838, Friedrich Bessel measured a stellar parallax, an apparent shift in the position of a star created by Earth's motion around the Sun, providing the first direct, experimental proof of heliocentrism. Improvements in observational astronomy and the use of unmanned spacecraft have since enabled the detailed investigation of other bodies orbiting the Sun; the principal component of the Solar System is the Sun, a G2 main-sequence star that contains 99.86% of the system's known mass and dominates it gravitationally.
The Sun's four largest orbiting bodies, the giant planets, account for 99% of the remaining mass, with Jupiter and Saturn together comprising more than 90%. The remaining objects of the Solar System together comprise less than 0.002% of the Solar System's total mass. Most large objects in orbit around the Sun lie near the plane of Earth's orbit, known as the ecliptic; the planets are close to the ecliptic, whereas comets and Kuiper belt objects are at greater angles to it. All the planets, most other objects, orbit the Sun in the same direction that the Sun is rotating. There are exceptions, such as Halley's Comet; the overall structure of the charted regions of the Solar System consists of the Sun, four small inner planets surrounded by a belt of rocky asteroids, four giant planets surrounded by the Kuiper belt of icy objects. Astronomers sometimes informally divide this structure into separate regions; the inner Solar System includes the asteroid belt. The outer Solar System is including the four giant planets.
Since the discovery of the Kuiper belt, the outermost parts of the Solar Sys
Asteroid family
An asteroid family is a population of asteroids that share similar proper orbital elements, such as semimajor axis and orbital inclination. The members of the families are thought to be fragments of past asteroid collisions. An asteroid family is a more specific term than asteroid group whose members, while sharing some broad orbital characteristics, may be otherwise unrelated to each other. Large prominent families contain several hundred recognized asteroids. Small, compact families may have only about ten identified members. About 33% to 35% of asteroids in the main belt are family members. There are about 20 to 30 reliably recognized families, with several tens of less certain groupings. Most asteroid families are found in the main asteroid belt, although several family-like groups such as the Pallas family, Hungaria family, the Phocaea family lie at smaller semi-major axis or larger inclination than the main belt. One family has been identified associated with the dwarf planet Haumea; some studies have tried to find evidence of collisional families among the trojan asteroids, but at present the evidence is inconclusive.
The families are thought to form as a result of collisions between asteroids. In many or most cases the parent body was shattered, but there are several families which resulted from a large cratering event which did not disrupt the parent body; such cratering families consist of a single large body and a swarm of asteroids that are much smaller. Some families have complex internal structures which are not satisfactorily explained at the moment, but may be due to several collisions in the same region at different times. Due to the method of origin, all the members have matching compositions for most families. Notable exceptions are those families. Asteroid families are thought to have lifetimes of the order of a billion years, depending on various factors; this is shorter than the Solar System's age, so few if any are relics of the early Solar System. Decay of families occurs both because of slow dissipation of the orbits due to perturbations from Jupiter or other large bodies, because of collisions between asteroids which grind them down to small bodies.
Such small asteroids become subject to perturbations such as the Yarkovsky effect that can push them towards orbital resonances with Jupiter over time. Once there, they are rapidly ejected from the asteroid belt. Tentative age estimates have been obtained for some families, ranging from hundreds of millions of years to less than several million years as for the compact Karin family. Old families are thought to contain few small members, this is the basis of the age determinations, it is supposed that many old families have lost all the smaller and medium-sized members, leaving only a few of the largest intact. A suggested example of such old family remains are 113 Amalthea pair. Further evidence for a large number of past families comes from analysis of chemical ratios in iron meteorites; these show that there must have once been at least 50 to 100 parent bodies large enough to be differentiated, that have since been shattered to expose their cores and produce the actual meteorites. When the orbital elements of main belt asteroids are plotted, a number of distinct concentrations are seen against the rather uniform distribution of non-family background asteroids.
These concentrations are the asteroid families. Interlopers are asteroids classified as family members based on their so-called proper orbital elements but having spectroscopic properties distinct from the bulk of the family, suggesting that they, contrary to the true family members, did not originate from the same parent body that once fragmented upon a collisional impact. Speaking and their membership are identified by analysing the proper orbital elements rather than the current osculating orbital elements, which fluctuate on timescales of tens of thousands of years; the proper elements are related constants of motion that remain constant for times of at least tens of millions of years, longer. The Japanese astronomer Kiyotsugu Hirayama pioneered the estimation of proper elements for asteroids, first identified several of the most prominent families in 1918. In his honor, asteroid families are sometimes called Hirayama families; this applies to the five prominent groupings discovered by him.
Present day computer-assisted searches have identified more than a hundred asteroid families. The most prominent algorithms have been the hierarchical clustering method, which looks for groupings with small nearest-neighbour distances in orbital element space, wavelet analysis, which builds a density-of-asteroids map in orbital element space, looks for density peaks; the boundaries of the families are somewhat vague because at the edges they blend into the background density of asteroids in the main belt. For this reason the number of members among discovered asteroids is only known and membership is uncertain for asteroids near the edges. Additionally, some interlopers from the heterogeneous background asteroid population are expected in the central regions of a family. Since the true family members caused by the collision are expected to have similar compositions, most such interlopers can in principle be recognised by spectral properties which do not matc
64 Angelina
Angelina is an asteroid from the central region of the asteroid belt 50 kilometers in diameter. It is an unusually bright form of E-type asteroid. Angelina was discovered on March 4, 1861, by a prolific comet discoverer, E. W. Tempel, observing from Marseilles, France, it was the first of his five asteroid discoveries. Angelina's name caused some controversy, it was chosen by Benjamin Valz, director of the Marseilles Observatory, in honour of the astronomical station of that name operated by Baron Franz Xaver von Zach on the mountains above the city. At the time, asteroids were supposed to receive names from classical mythology, several astronomers protested the choice. Tempel noted. However, Valz's choice stayed. Angelina is an uncommon form of E-type asteroid; as of 1991, it is thought to have an average radius of about 30 kilometers. Back when asteroids were assumed to have low albedos, Angelina was thought to be the largest of this class, but modern research has shown that its diameter is only a quarter of what was assumed, an error caused by its exceptional brightness.
Traditional calculations had suggested that since Angelina has an absolute magnitude of 7.7 and an albedo of 0.15, its diameter would have been around 100 km. However, a 2004 occultation showed a cross-sectional profile of only 48x53 km. Angelina was observed by Arecibo radar in January 2010. 2004 Angelina occultation 64 Angelina at AstDyS-2, Asteroids—Dynamic Site Ephemeris · Observation prediction · Orbital info · Proper elements · Observational info 64 Angelina at the JPL Small-Body Database Close approach · Discovery · Ephemeris · Orbit diagram · Orbital elements · Physical parameters
Enstatite
Enstatite is a mineral. The magnesium rich members of the solid solution series are common rock-forming minerals found in igneous and metamorphic rocks; the intermediate composition, SiO3, has been known as hypersthene, although this name has been formally abandoned and replaced by orthopyroxene. When determined petrographically or chemically the composition is given as relative proportions of enstatite and ferrosilite. Most natural crystals are orthorhombic; the high temperature, low pressure polymorphs are protoenstatite and protoferrosilite while the low temperature forms and clinoferrosilite, are monoclinic. Weathered enstatite with a small amount of iron takes on a submetallic luster and a bronze-like color; this material is termed bronzite, although it is more called altered enstatite. Bronzite and hypersthene were known long before enstatite, first described by G. A. Kenngott in 1855. An emerald-green variety of enstatite is cut as a gemstone; the green color is caused by traces of chromium, hence the varietal name.
In addition, bronzite is sometimes used as a gemstone. Enstatite and the other orthorhombic pyroxenes are distinguished from those of the monoclinic series by their optical characteristics, such as straight extinction, much weaker double refraction and stronger pleochroism, they have a prismatic cleavage, perfect in two directions at 90 degrees. Enstatite is white, greenish, or brown in color. Isolated crystals are rare, but orthopyroxene is an essential constituent of various types of igneous rocks and metamorphic rocks. Magnesian orthopyroxene occurs in plutonic rocks such as diorite, it may form small idiomorphic phenocrysts and groundmass grains in volcanic rocks such as basalt and dacite. Enstatite, close to En90Fs10 in composition, is an essential mineral in typical peridotite and pyroxenite of the Earth's mantle. Xenoliths of peridotite are common in some basalt. Measurements of the calcium and chromium contents of enstatite in these xenoliths have been crucial in reconstructing the depths from which the xenoliths were plucked by the ascending magmas.
Orthopyroxene is an important constituent of some metamorphic rocks such as granulite. Orthopyroxene near pure enstatite in composition occurs in some metamorphosed serpentines. Large crystals, a foot in length and altered to steatite, were found in 1874 in the apatite veins traversing mica-schist and hornblende-schist at the apatite mine of Kjørstad, near Brevik in southern Norway. Enstatite is a common mineral in meteorites. Crystals have been found in stony and iron meteorites, including one that fell at Breitenbach in the Ore Mountains, Bohemia. In some meteorites, together with olivine it forms the bulk of the material. Enstatite is one of the few silicate minerals that have been observed in crystalline form outside the Solar System around evolved stars and planetary nebulae such as NGC 6302. Enstatite is thought to be one of the early stages for the formation of crystalline silicates in space and many correlations have been noted between the occurrence of the mineral and the structure of the object around which it has been observed.
Enstatite is thought to be a main component of the E-type asteroids. Deer, W. A. Howie, R. A. and Zussman, J.. An introduction to the rock-forming minerals. Harlow: Longman ISBN 0-582-30094-0Attribution This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed.. "Enstatite". Encyclopædia Britannica. Cambridge University Press
Asteroid belt
The asteroid belt is the circumstellar disc in the Solar System located between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter. It is occupied by numerous irregularly shaped bodies called minor planets; the asteroid belt is termed the main asteroid belt or main belt to distinguish it from other asteroid populations in the Solar System such as near-Earth asteroids and trojan asteroids. About half the mass of the belt is contained in the four largest asteroids: Ceres, Vesta and Hygiea; the total mass of the asteroid belt is 4% that of the Moon, or 22% that of Pluto, twice that of Pluto's moon Charon. Ceres, the asteroid belt's only dwarf planet, is about 950 km in diameter, whereas 4 Vesta, 2 Pallas, 10 Hygiea have mean diameters of less than 600 km; the remaining bodies range down to the size of a dust particle. The asteroid material is so thinly distributed that numerous unmanned spacecraft have traversed it without incident. Nonetheless, collisions between large asteroids do occur, these can produce an asteroid family whose members have similar orbital characteristics and compositions.
Individual asteroids within the asteroid belt are categorized by their spectra, with most falling into three basic groups: carbonaceous and metal-rich. The asteroid belt formed from the primordial solar nebula as a group of planetesimals. Planetesimals are the smaller precursors of the protoplanets. Between Mars and Jupiter, gravitational perturbations from Jupiter imbued the protoplanets with too much orbital energy for them to accrete into a planet. Collisions became too violent, instead of fusing together, the planetesimals and most of the protoplanets shattered; as a result, 99.9% of the asteroid belt's original mass was lost in the first 100 million years of the Solar System's history. Some fragments found their way into the inner Solar System, leading to meteorite impacts with the inner planets. Asteroid orbits continue to be appreciably perturbed whenever their period of revolution about the Sun forms an orbital resonance with Jupiter. At these orbital distances, a Kirkwood gap occurs. Classes of small Solar System bodies in other regions are the near-Earth objects, the centaurs, the Kuiper belt objects, the scattered disc objects, the sednoids, the Oort cloud objects.
On 22 January 2014, ESA scientists reported the detection, for the first definitive time, of water vapor on Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt. The detection was made by using the far-infrared abilities of the Herschel Space Observatory; the finding was unexpected because comets, not asteroids, are considered to "sprout jets and plumes". According to one of the scientists, "The lines are becoming more and more blurred between comets and asteroids." In 1596, Johannes Kepler predicted “Between Mars and Jupiter, I place a planet” in his Mysterium Cosmographicum. While analyzing Tycho Brahe's data, Kepler thought that there was too large a gap between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. In an anonymous footnote to his 1766 translation of Charles Bonnet's Contemplation de la Nature, the astronomer Johann Daniel Titius of Wittenberg noted an apparent pattern in the layout of the planets. If one began a numerical sequence at 0 included 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, etc. doubling each time, added four to each number and divided by 10, this produced a remarkably close approximation to the radii of the orbits of the known planets as measured in astronomical units provided one allowed for a "missing planet" between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
In his footnote, Titius declared "But should the Lord Architect have left that space empty? Not at all."When William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781, the planet's orbit matched the law perfectly, leading astronomers to conclude that there had to be a planet between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. On January 1, 1801, Giuseppe Piazzi, chair of astronomy at the University of Palermo, found a tiny moving object in an orbit with the radius predicted by this pattern, he dubbed it "Ceres", after the Roman goddess of the patron of Sicily. Piazzi believed it to be a comet, but its lack of a coma suggested it was a planet. Thus, the aforementioned pattern, now known as the Titius–Bode law, predicted the semi-major axes of all eight planets of the time. Fifteen months Heinrich Olbers discovered a second object in the same region, Pallas. Unlike the other known planets and Pallas remained points of light under the highest telescope magnifications instead of resolving into discs. Apart from their rapid movement, they appeared indistinguishable from stars.
Accordingly, in 1802, William Herschel suggested they be placed into a separate category, named "asteroids", after the Greek asteroeides, meaning "star-like". Upon completing a series of observations of Ceres and Pallas, he concluded, Neither the appellation of planets nor that of comets, can with any propriety of language be given to these two stars... They resemble small stars so much. From this, their asteroidal appearance, if I take my name, call them Asteroids. By 1807, further investigation revealed two new objects in the region: Vesta; the burning of Lilienthal in the Napoleonic wars, where the main body of work had been done, brought this first period of discovery to a close. Despite Herschel's coinage, for several decades it remained common practice to refer to these objects as planets and to prefix t
Orbit
In physics, an orbit is the gravitationally curved trajectory of an object, such as the trajectory of a planet around a star or a natural satellite around a planet. Orbit refers to a repeating trajectory, although it may refer to a non-repeating trajectory. To a close approximation and satellites follow elliptic orbits, with the central mass being orbited at a focal point of the ellipse, as described by Kepler's laws of planetary motion. For most situations, orbital motion is adequately approximated by Newtonian mechanics, which explains gravity as a force obeying an inverse-square law. However, Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which accounts for gravity as due to curvature of spacetime, with orbits following geodesics, provides a more accurate calculation and understanding of the exact mechanics of orbital motion; the apparent motions of the planets were described by European and Arabic philosophers using the idea of celestial spheres. This model posited the existence of perfect moving spheres or rings to which the stars and planets were attached.
It assumed the heavens were fixed apart from the motion of the spheres, was developed without any understanding of gravity. After the planets' motions were more measured, theoretical mechanisms such as deferent and epicycles were added. Although the model was capable of reasonably predicting the planets' positions in the sky and more epicycles were required as the measurements became more accurate, hence the model became unwieldy. Geocentric it was modified by Copernicus to place the Sun at the centre to help simplify the model; the model was further challenged during the 16th century, as comets were observed traversing the spheres. The basis for the modern understanding of orbits was first formulated by Johannes Kepler whose results are summarised in his three laws of planetary motion. First, he found that the orbits of the planets in our Solar System are elliptical, not circular, as had been believed, that the Sun is not located at the center of the orbits, but rather at one focus. Second, he found that the orbital speed of each planet is not constant, as had been thought, but rather that the speed depends on the planet's distance from the Sun.
Third, Kepler found a universal relationship between the orbital properties of all the planets orbiting the Sun. For the planets, the cubes of their distances from the Sun are proportional to the squares of their orbital periods. Jupiter and Venus, for example, are about 5.2 and 0.723 AU distant from the Sun, their orbital periods about 11.86 and 0.615 years. The proportionality is seen by the fact that the ratio for Jupiter, 5.23/11.862, is equal to that for Venus, 0.7233/0.6152, in accord with the relationship. Idealised orbits meeting these rules are known as Kepler orbits. Isaac Newton demonstrated that Kepler's laws were derivable from his theory of gravitation and that, in general, the orbits of bodies subject to gravity were conic sections. Newton showed that, for a pair of bodies, the orbits' sizes are in inverse proportion to their masses, that those bodies orbit their common center of mass. Where one body is much more massive than the other, it is a convenient approximation to take the center of mass as coinciding with the center of the more massive body.
Advances in Newtonian mechanics were used to explore variations from the simple assumptions behind Kepler orbits, such as the perturbations due to other bodies, or the impact of spheroidal rather than spherical bodies. Lagrange developed a new approach to Newtonian mechanics emphasizing energy more than force, made progress on the three body problem, discovering the Lagrangian points. In a dramatic vindication of classical mechanics, in 1846 Urbain Le Verrier was able to predict the position of Neptune based on unexplained perturbations in the orbit of Uranus. Albert Einstein in his 1916 paper The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity explained that gravity was due to curvature of space-time and removed Newton's assumption that changes propagate instantaneously; this led astronomers to recognize that Newtonian mechanics did not provide the highest accuracy in understanding orbits. In relativity theory, orbits follow geodesic trajectories which are approximated well by the Newtonian predictions but the differences are measurable.
All the experimental evidence that can distinguish between the theories agrees with relativity theory to within experimental measurement accuracy. The original vindication of general relativity is that it was able to account for the remaining unexplained amount in precession of Mercury's perihelion first noted by Le Verrier. However, Newton's solution is still used for most short term purposes since it is easier to use and sufficiently accurate. Within a planetary system, dwarf planets and other minor planets and space debris orbit the system's barycenter in elliptical orbits. A comet in a parabolic or hyperbolic orbit about a barycenter is not gravitationally bound to the star and therefore is not considered part of the star's planetary system. Bodies which are gravitationally bound to one of the planets in a planetary system, either natural or artificial satellites, follow orbits about a barycenter near or within that planet. Owing to mutual gravitational perturbations, the eccentricities of the planetary orbits vary over time.
Mercury, the smallest planet in the Solar System, has the most eccentric orbit
44 Nysa
Nysa is a large and bright main-belt asteroid, the brightest member of the Nysian asteroid family. It is classified as a rare class E asteroid and is the largest of this type, it was discovered by Hermann Goldschmidt on May 27, 1857, named after the mythical land of Nysa in Greek mythology. In 2002 Kaasalainen et al. used 63 lightcurves from the Uppsala Asteroid Photometric Catalog to construct a shape model of 44 Nysa. The shape model is conical, which they interpreted as indicating the asteroid may be a contact binary. In 2003, Tanga et al. published results obtained from the Fine Guidance Sensor on the Hubble Space Telescope in which high-precision interferometry was performed on Nysa with the goal of a more accurate shape determination. Due to Hubble's orbit around the Earth, hours-long photometry sessions, as are used to resolve the asteroid's shape, were not possible. Instead, the team used interferometry on the asteroid at the time in its rotation when it would have its longest axis perpendicular to the Earth.
Ellipsoidal shape models were fit to the resulting data to determine an estimate of the asteroid's shape. Both single and double ellipsoid models were fit to the data with both providing the same goodness of fit. An observation of an occultation by 44 Nysa of TYC 6273-01033-1 from the Dutch amateur astronomer Harrie Rutten showed a two-phase reappearance on March 20, 2012; this confirms the binary nature of Nysa. In December 2006, Shepard et al. performed three days of radar observations on Nysa with the Arecibo radio telescope. The asteroid was found to have a high radar polarization value of 0.50 ± 0.2, a radar albedo of 0.19 ± 0.06, a visual albedo of 0.44 ± 0.10. The albedo measurements were based on a shape model worked out at Arecibo; the best fit shape model as measured by the Arecibo team has parameters a/b = 1.7 ± 0.1, a/c = 1.6–1.9, with an a-axis of 113 ± 10 km. The data gathered showed signs of significant concavity in Nysa's structure, but the dip in the radar curves is not pronounced enough to indicate bifurcation, calling into question whether or not Nysa is a contact binary.
Nysa has so far been reported occulting a star three times. 44 Nysa was in a study of asteroids using the Hubble FGS. Asteroids studied include Ausonia, Ariadne and Hektor. Aubrite E-type asteroid Hungaria family 64 Angelina 3103 Eger 55 Pandora 2867 Šteins 2015 TC25 Harris, A. W.. "Phase relations of high albedo asteroids: The unusual opposition brightening of 44 Nysa and 64 Angelina". Icarus. 81: 365–374. Bibcode:1989Icar...81..365H. Doi:10.1016/0019-103590057-2. 44 Nysa at the JPL Small-Body Database Close approach · Discovery · Ephemeris · Orbit diagram · Orbital elements · Physical parameters
