What does our solar system contain?
Question:
Answer:
Our Solar System is a set of nine planets plus asteroids and comets surrounding our star, the Sun. Most of the hundreds of billions of other stars in the Milky Way may have their own solar systems.
For an individual star of the Milky Way to be seen distinctly in Earth's night sky, it must lie sufficiently close to our Solar System to be discerned separately.
our solar system cotains stars like sun planets like Jupiter earth
, asteroids and moons and satellite of planets
Hydrogen, helium, plus a minor quantity of various other elements
Pluto is not longer a planet so you cannot count him as more than a blue dwarf
Once upon a time 400 years ago it was thought to contain 8 objects. The Sun, the Moon, Earth and 5 other planets.
Then in January 1610 Galileo discovered 4 moons orbiting Jupiter and the number of objects rose by 50% to 12. And it has been a story of exponential growth ever since. With the advent of telescopes enabling us to see objects not visible to the naked eye.
Two major planets Uranus and Neptune were discovered, making 8 in all. These 8 planets are now known to have a total of 163 moons. The latest, 57th, moon of Saturn was discovered earlier this month. The numbers have shot up since ground-based telescopes have been augmented by fly-bys of probes such as Voyager I and II sending photographs back to Earth.
In 1801 the first asteroid Ceres was discovered and after a slow start, the numbers have rise dramatically such that we now know of 360,000 or more of them and it is thought there could be as many as 1.9 million in all, of size 1 kilometer or larger. 98% of these orbut bvetween Mars and Jupiter,
More than 1,000 objects further out than Neptune are now known, 800 of these in the Kuiper Belt (known collectively as Kuiper Belt Objects or KBOs) and a smaller number in the Scattered Disk. further out still.
Ceres (in the main asteroid belt) Pluto (in the Kuiper Belt) and Eris (in the Scattered Disk) were in 2006 reclassified as Dwarf Planets and it is expected that the IAU will add to the numbers of objects they place in this category
Some 90 moons of asteroids, KBOs and other minor planets are now known to exist,
Beyond the Scattered Disk is the Oort Cloud from where the majority of comets that are seen in the inner Solar System originate. Comets leave trails of dust and debris behind them when they orbit the Sun and we see meteor showers in our skies when that debris enters our atmosphere as the earth reaches the point in its orbit where a comet passed by often many years before. And of course we are busily polluting space with our own debris sent up by rockets!
So 400 years later, there is a whole lot more than 8 objects in this patch of space and no sooner have you taken a census than more are discovered and it is out of date again.
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