1.
Solar System
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The Solar System is the gravitationally bound system comprising the Sun and the objects that orbit it, either directly or indirectly. Of those objects that orbit the Sun directly, the largest eight are the planets, with the remainder being significantly smaller objects, such as dwarf planets, 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 collapse of a giant interstellar molecular cloud. The vast majority of the mass is in the Sun. The four smaller inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, are terrestrial planets, being composed of rock. The four outer planets are giant planets, being more massive than the terrestrials. All planets have almost circular orbits that lie within a flat disc called the ecliptic. The Solar System also contains smaller objects, the asteroid belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, mostly contains objects composed, like the terrestrial planets, of rock and metal. Beyond Neptunes orbit lie the Kuiper belt and scattered disc, which are populations of trans-Neptunian objects composed mostly of ices, within these populations are several dozen to possibly 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 asteroid Ceres and the trans-Neptunian objects Pluto and Eris. In addition to two regions, various other small-body populations, including comets, centaurs and interplanetary dust clouds. Six of the planets, at least four of the dwarf planets, 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, the heliopause is the point at which pressure from the solar wind is equal to the opposing pressure of the interstellar medium, it extends out to the edge of the scattered disc. The Oort cloud, which is thought to be the source for long-period comets, the Solar System is located in the Orion Arm,26,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way. For most of history, humanity did not recognize or understand the concept of the Solar System, the invention of the telescope led to the discovery of further planets and moons. The principal component of the Solar System is the Sun, a G2 main-sequence star that contains 99. 86% of the known mass. The Suns four largest orbiting bodies, the giant planets, account for 99% of the mass, with Jupiter. The remaining objects of the Solar System together comprise less than 0. 002% of the Solar Systems total mass, most large objects in orbit around the Sun lie near the plane of Earths orbit, known as the ecliptic
2.
Giant planet
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A giant planet is any massive planet. They are usually composed of low-boiling-point materials, rather than rock or other solid matter. There are four giant planets in the Solar System, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus. Many extrasolar giant planets have been identified orbiting other stars, giant planets are also sometimes called jovian planets, after Jupiter. They are also known as gas giants. However, many astronomers apply the term only to Jupiter and Saturn, classifying Uranus and Neptune. Both names are misleading, all of the giant planets consist primarily of fluids above their critical points. The principal components are hydrogen and helium in the case of Jupiter and Saturn, the defining differences between a very low-mass brown dwarf and a gas giant are debated. One school of thought is based on formation, the other, part of the debate concerns whether brown dwarfs must, by definition, have experienced nuclear fusion at some point in their history. The term gas giant was coined in 1952 by the fiction writer James Blish and was originally used to refer to all giant planets. Arguably it is something of a misnomer, because throughout most of the volume of these planets the pressure is so high that matter is not in gaseous form. Other than solids in the core and the layers of the atmosphere, all matter is above the critical point. Fluid planet would be an accurate term. Jupiter also has metallic hydrogen near its center, but much of its volume is hydrogen, helium, the observable atmospheres of all these planets are quite thin compared to their radii, only extending perhaps one percent of the way to the center. Thus the observable portions are gaseous, in the outer Solar System, hydrogen and helium are referred to as gases, water, methane, and ammonia as ices, and silicates and metals as rock. When deep planetary interiors are considered, it may not be far off to say that, by ice astronomers mean oxygen and carbon, by rock they mean silicon, and by gas they mean hydrogen and helium. The many ways in which Uranus and Neptune differ from Jupiter, with this terminology in mind, some astronomers have started referring to Uranus and Neptune as ice giants to indicate the predominance of the ices in their interior composition. The alternative term jovian planet refers to the Roman god Jupiter—the genitive form of which is Jovis, objects large enough to start deuterium fusion are called brown dwarfs, and these occupy the mass range between that of large giant planets and the lowest-mass stars
3.
Accretion (astrophysics)
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In astrophysics, accretion is the accumulation of particles into a massive object by gravitationally attracting more matter, typically gaseous matter, in an accretion disk. Most astronomical objects, such as galaxies, stars, and planets, are formed by accretion processes, the idea proposed in the 19th century that Earth and the other terrestrial planets formed from meteoric material was developed in a quantitative way in 1969 by Viktor Safronov. He calculated, in detail, the different stages of planet formation. Since then, the theory has been developed using intensive numerical simulations to study planetesimal accumulation. Stars form by the collapse of interstellar gas. Prior to collapse, this gas is mostly in the form of molecular clouds, as the cloud collapses, losing potential energy, it heats up, gaining kinetic energy, and the conservation of angular momentum ensures that the cloud forms a flatted disk—the accretion disk. A few hundred years after the Big Bang, the Universe cooled to the point where atoms could form. As the Universe continued to expand and cool, the atoms lost enough kinetic energy, as further accretion occurred, galaxies formed. Galaxies grow through mergers and smooth gas accretion, accretion also occurs inside galaxies, forming stars. Stars are thought to form inside giant clouds of cold molecular hydrogen—giant molecular clouds of roughly 300,000 M☉ and 65 light-years in diameter, over millions of years, giant molecular clouds are prone to collapse and fragmentation. These fragments then form small, dense cores, which in turn collapse into stars, the cores range in mass from a fraction to several times that of the Sun and are called protostellar nebulae. They possess diameters of 2, 000–20,000 astronomical units, compare it with the particle number density of the air at the sea level—2. 8×1019/cm3. The initial collapse of a solar-mass protostellar nebula takes around 100,000 years, every nebula begins with a certain amount of angular momentum. This core forms the seed of what will become a star, as the collapse continues, conservation of angular momentum dictates that the rotation of the infalling envelope accelerates, which eventually forms a disk. Around this time the protostar begins to fuse deuterium, if the protostar is sufficiently massive, hydrogen fusion follows. Otherwise, if its mass is too low, the object becomes a brown dwarf and this birth of a new star occurs approximately 100,000 years after the collapse begins. Objects at this stage are known as Class I protostars, which are also called young T Tauri stars, evolved protostars, or young stellar objects. By this time, the star has already accreted much of its mass
4.
Sun
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The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a perfect sphere of hot plasma, with internal convective motion that generates a magnetic field via a dynamo process. It is by far the most important source of energy for life on Earth. Its diameter is about 109 times that of Earth, and its mass is about 330,000 times that of Earth, accounting for about 99. 86% of the total mass of the Solar System. About three quarters of the Suns mass consists of hydrogen, the rest is mostly helium, with smaller quantities of heavier elements, including oxygen, carbon, neon. The Sun is a G-type main-sequence star based on its spectral class and it formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of matter within a region of a large molecular cloud. Most of this matter gathered in the center, whereas the rest flattened into a disk that became the Solar System. The central mass became so hot and dense that it eventually initiated nuclear fusion in its core and it is thought that almost all stars form by this process. The Sun is roughly middle-aged, it has not changed dramatically for more than four billion years and it is calculated that the Sun will become sufficiently large enough to engulf the current orbits of Mercury, Venus, and probably Earth. The enormous effect of the Sun on Earth has been recognized since prehistoric times, the synodic rotation of Earth and its orbit around the Sun are the basis of the solar calendar, which is the predominant calendar in use today. The English proper name Sun developed from Old English sunne and may be related to south, all Germanic terms for the Sun stem from Proto-Germanic *sunnōn. The English weekday name Sunday stems from Old English and is ultimately a result of a Germanic interpretation of Latin dies solis, the Latin name for the Sun, Sol, is not common in general English language use, the adjectival form is the related word solar. The term sol is used by planetary astronomers to refer to the duration of a solar day on another planet. A mean Earth solar day is approximately 24 hours, whereas a mean Martian sol is 24 hours,39 minutes, and 35.244 seconds. From at least the 4th Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, the Sun was worshipped as the god Ra, portrayed as a falcon-headed divinity surmounted by the solar disk, and surrounded by a serpent. In the New Empire period, the Sun became identified with the dung beetle, in the form of the Sun disc Aten, the Sun had a brief resurgence during the Amarna Period when it again became the preeminent, if not only, divinity for the Pharaoh Akhenaton. The Sun is viewed as a goddess in Germanic paganism, Sól/Sunna, in ancient Roman culture, Sunday was the day of the Sun god. It was adopted as the Sabbath day by Christians who did not have a Jewish background, the symbol of light was a pagan device adopted by Christians, and perhaps the most important one that did not come from Jewish traditions
5.
Open cluster
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An open cluster is a group of up to a few thousand stars that were formed from the same giant molecular cloud and have roughly the same age. More than 1,100 open clusters have been discovered within the Milky Way Galaxy and they are loosely bound by mutual gravitational attraction and become disrupted by close encounters with other clusters and clouds of gas as they orbit the galactic center. This can result in a migration to the body of the galaxy. Open clusters generally survive for a few hundred years, with the most massive ones surviving for a few billion years. In contrast, the more massive clusters of stars exert a stronger gravitational attraction on their members. Open clusters have been only in spiral and irregular galaxies. Young open clusters may not be contained within the cloud from which they formed. Over time, radiation pressure from the cluster will disperse the molecular cloud, typically, about 10% of the mass of a gas cloud will coalesce into stars before radiation pressure drives the rest of the gas away. Open clusters are key objects in the study of stellar evolution, because the cluster members are of similar age and chemical composition, their properties are more easily determined than they are for isolated stars. A number of clusters, such as the Pleiades, Hyades or the Alpha Persei Cluster are visible with the naked eye. Some others, such as the Double Cluster, are barely perceptible without instruments, the Wild Duck Cluster, M11, is an example. The prominent open cluster the Pleiades has been recognized as a group of stars since antiquity, while the Hyades forms part of Taurus, other open clusters were noted by early astronomers as unresolved fuzzy patches of light. The Roman astronomer Ptolemy mentions the Praesepe, the Double Cluster in Perseus, however, it would require the invention of the telescope to resolve these nebulae into their constituent stars. Indeed, in 1603 Johann Bayer gave three of these clusters designations as if they were single stars, the first person to use a telescope to observe the night sky and record his observations was the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei in 1609. When he turned the telescope toward some of the nebulous patches recorded by Ptolemy, he found they were not a single star, for Praesepe, he found more than 40 stars. Where previously observers had noted only 6-7 stars in the Pleiades, in his 1610 treatise Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo Galilei wrote, the galaxy is nothing else but a mass of innumerable stars planted together in clusters. Influenced by Galileos work, the Sicilian astronomer Giovanni Hodierna became possibly the first astronomer to use a telescope to find previously undiscovered open clusters, in 1654, he identified the objects now designated Messier 41, Messier 47, NGC2362 and NGC2451. Between 1774–1781, French astronomer Charles Messier published a catalogue of objects that had a nebulous appearance similar to comets
6.
Planets beyond Neptune
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Following the discovery of the planet Neptune in 1846, there was considerable speculation that another planet might exist beyond its orbit. In 1978, Pluto was conclusively determined to be too small for its gravity to affect the giant planets, resulting in a brief search for a tenth planet. As of March 2014, observations with the WISE telescope have ruled out the possibility of a Saturn-sized object out to 10,000 AU, and a Jupiter-sized or larger object out to 26,000 AU. In 2016 further work showed this unknown distant planet is likely on an inclined, eccentric orbit that goes no closer than about 200 AU, the orbit is predicted to be anti-aligned to the clustered extreme trans-Neptunian objects. Because Pluto is no longer considered a planet by the International Astronomical Union, Le Verrier predicted the position of this new planet and sent his calculations to German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle. On 23 September 1846, the following his receipt of the letter, Galle and his student Heinrich dArrest discovered Neptune. There remained some slight discrepancies in the giant planets orbits and these were taken to indicate the existence of yet another planet orbiting beyond Neptune. Even before Neptunes discovery, some speculated that one alone was not enough to explain the discrepancy. Hansens opinion was that a body could not adequately explain the motion of Uranus. In 1848, Jacques Babinet raised an objection to Le Verriers calculations, claiming that Neptunes observed mass was smaller and its orbit larger than Le Verrier had initially predicted. He postulated, based largely on simple subtraction from Le Verriers calculations, that another planet of roughly 12 Earth masses, which he named Hyperion, must exist beyond Neptune. Le Verrier denounced Babinets hypothesis, saying, absolutely nothing by which one could determine the position of another planet, astronomer George Forbes concluded on the basis of this evidence that two planets must exist beyond Neptune. These elements concorded suggestively with those made independently by another astronomer named David Peck Todd, however, sceptics argued that the orbits of the comets involved were still too uncertain to produce meaningful results. In 1900 and 1901, Harvard College Observatory director William Henry Pickering led two searches for trans-Neptunian planets, the second was launched when Gabriel Dallet suggested that a single trans-Neptunian planet lying at 47 AU could account for the motion of Uranus. Pickering agreed to examine plates for any suspected planets, in neither case were any found. In 1909, Thomas Jefferson Jackson See, an astronomer with a reputation as a contrarian, opined that there is certainly one. Tentatively naming the first planet Oceanus, he placed their respective distances at 42,56 and 72 AU from the Sun and he gave no indication as to how he determined their existence, and no known searches were mounted to locate them. In 1911, Indian astronomer Venkatesh P, the three inner Galilean moons of Jupiter, Io, Europa and Ganymede, are locked in a complicated 1,2,4 resonance called a Laplace resonance
7.
Kuiper belt
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It is similar to the asteroid belt, but it is far larger—20 times as wide and 20 to 200 times as massive. Like the asteroid belt, it consists mainly of small bodies, although many asteroids are composed primarily of rock and metal, most Kuiper belt objects are composed largely of frozen volatiles, such as methane, ammonia and water. The Kuiper belt is home to three officially recognized dwarf planets, Pluto, Haumea, and Makemake, some of the Solar Systems moons, such as Neptunes Triton and Saturns Phoebe, are also thought to have originated in the region. The Kuiper belt was named after Dutch-American astronomer Gerard Kuiper, though he did not actually predict its existence, in 1992,1992 QB1 was discovered, the first Kuiper belt object since Pluto. Since its discovery, the number of known KBOs has increased to over a thousand, the Kuiper belt should not be confused with the theorized Oort cloud, which is a thousand times more distant and is mostly spherical. The objects within the Kuiper belt, together with the members of the scattered disc, Pluto is the largest and most-massive member of the Kuiper belt and the largest and the second-most-massive known TNO, surpassed only by Eris in the scattered disc. Originally considered a planet, Plutos status as part of the Kuiper belt caused it to be reclassified as a planet in 2006. It is compositionally similar to other objects of the Kuiper belt, and its orbital period is characteristic of a class of KBOs, known as plutinos. After the discovery of Pluto in 1930, many speculated that it not be alone. The region now called the Kuiper belt was hypothesized in various forms for decades and it was only in 1992 that the first direct evidence for its existence was found. The number and variety of speculations on the nature of the Kuiper belt have led to continued uncertainty as to who deserves credit for first proposing it. The first astronomer to suggest the existence of a population was Frederick C. That same year, astronomer Armin O. Leuschner suggested that Pluto may be one of many long-period planetary objects yet to be discovered. Kuiper was operating on the common in his time that Pluto was the size of Earth and had therefore scattered these bodies out toward the Oort cloud or out of the Solar System. Were Kuipers hypothesis correct, there would not be a Kuiper belt today, the hypothesis took many other forms in the following decades. Cameron postulated the existence of a mass of small material on the outskirts of the solar system. Observation, however, ruled out this hypothesis, in 1977, Charles Kowal discovered 2060 Chiron, an icy planetoid with an orbit between Saturn and Uranus. He used a blink comparator, the device that had allowed Clyde Tombaugh to discover Pluto nearly 50 years before
8.
Neptune
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Neptune is the eighth and farthest known planet from the Sun in the Solar System. In the Solar System, it is the fourth-largest planet by diameter, the planet. Neptune is 17 times the mass of Earth and is more massive than its near-twin Uranus. Neptune orbits the Sun once every 164.8 years at a distance of 30.1 astronomical units. It is named after the Roman god of the sea and has the astronomical symbol ♆, Neptune is not visible to the unaided eye and is the only planet in the Solar System found by mathematical prediction rather than by empirical observation. Unexpected changes in the orbit of Uranus led Alexis Bouvard to deduce that its orbit was subject to perturbation by an unknown planet. Neptune was subsequently observed with a telescope on 23 September 1846 by Johann Galle within a degree of the predicted by Urbain Le Verrier. Its largest moon, Triton, was discovered shortly thereafter, though none of the remaining known 14 moons were located telescopically until the 20th century. The planets distance from Earth gives it a small apparent size. Neptune was visited by Voyager 2, when it flew by the planet on 25 August 1989, the advent of the Hubble Space Telescope and large ground-based telescopes with adaptive optics has recently allowed for additional detailed observations from afar. Neptunes composition can be compared and contrasted with the Solar Systems other giant planets, however, its interior, like that of Uranus, is primarily composed of ices and rock, which is why Uranus and Neptune are normally considered ice giants to emphasise this distinction. Traces of methane in the outermost regions in part account for the blue appearance. In contrast to the hazy, relatively featureless atmosphere of Uranus, Neptunes atmosphere has active, for example, at the time of the Voyager 2 flyby in 1989, the planets southern hemisphere had a Great Dark Spot comparable to the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. These weather patterns are driven by the strongest sustained winds of any planet in the Solar System, because of its great distance from the Sun, Neptunes outer atmosphere is one of the coldest places in the Solar System, with temperatures at its cloud tops approaching 55 K. Temperatures at the centre are approximately 5,400 K. Neptune has a faint and fragmented ring system. On both occasions, Galileo seems to have mistaken Neptune for a star when it appeared close—in conjunction—to Jupiter in the night sky, hence. At his first observation in December 1612, Neptune was almost stationary in the sky because it had just turned retrograde that day and this apparent backward motion is created when Earths orbit takes it past an outer planet. Because Neptune was only beginning its yearly cycle, the motion of the planet was far too slight to be detected with Galileos small telescope
9.
Super-Earth
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The term super-Earth refers only to the mass of the planet, and so does not imply anything about the surface conditions or habitability. The alternative term gas dwarfs may be accurate for those at the higher end of the mass scale, as suggested by MIT professor Sara Seager. In general, super-Earths are defined exclusively by their masses, while sources generally agree on an upper bound of 10 Earth masses, the lower bound varies from 1 or 1.9 to 5, with various other definitions appearing in the popular media. The term super-Earth is also used by astronomers to refer to planets bigger than Earth-like planets and this definition was made by the Kepler Mission. Planets above 10 Earth masses are termed massive solid planets/mega-Earths or gas giant planets depending on whether they are mostly rock, the first super-Earths were discovered by Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail around the pulsar PSR B1257+12 in 1992. The two outer planets of the system have masses approximately four times Earth—too small to be gas giants, the first super-Earth around a main-sequence star was discovered by a team under Eugenio Rivera in 2005. It orbits Gliese 876 and received the designation Gliese 876 d and it has an estimated mass of 7.5 Earth masses and a very short orbital period of just about 2 days. Due to the proximity of Gliese 876 d to its host star, it may have a temperature of 430–650 kelvin. With Gliese 581 c having a mass of at least 5 Earth masses, subsequent research suggested Gliese 581 c had likely suffered a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus. Two further super-Earths were discovered in 2006, OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb with a mass of 5.5 Earth masses, which was found by gravitational microlensing, the smallest super-Earth found as of 2008 was MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb. The planet was announced by astrophysicist David P. Bennett for the international MOA collaboration on June 2,2008 and this planet has approximately 3.3 Earth masses and orbits a brown dwarf. It was detected by gravitational microlensing, in June 2008, European researchers announced the discovery of three super-Earths around the star HD40307, a star that is only slightly less massive than our Sun. The planets have at least the minimum masses,4.2,6.7. The planets were detected by the radial velocity method by the HARPS in Chile, in addition, the same European research team announced a planet 7.5 times the mass of Earth orbiting the star HD181433. This star also has a Jupiter-like planet that orbits every three years, planet COROT-7b, with a mass estimated at 4.8 Earth masses and an orbital period of only 0.853 days, was announced on 3 February 2009. The density estimate obtained for COROT-7b points to a composition including rocky silicate minerals, similar to the four planets of the Solar System. COROT-7b, discovered right after HD7924 b, is the first super-Earth discovered that orbits a main star that is G class or larger. The discovery of Gliese 581 e with a mass of 1.9 Earth masses was announced on 21 April 2009
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