Does any one know how large our solar system is & how many miles the reach of our sun's gravity extends?
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tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo... wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo... BIG so yeah that good
If you take Pluto as being on the edge of the solar system then it measures approximately 7.4 billion miles from one side across to the other.
As for the sun's gravity. The sun like everything creates a gravitational pull. On earth it is of course the earth's gravity that has the most noticeable effect, the moon causes the second largest effect which is most noticeable in the tides and the sun is third. However, every planet in the solar system (and everything else for that matter) also has an effect although in many cases it's so minute that it goes un-noticed.
Basically the more mass an object has and the closer you are to it the more pronounced the effect of gravity will be.
There is no limit to the size of any gravitational field it's just that as you move away from an object the gravity becomes less and less.
The diameter of the solar system is two time the distance of the furthest planet, Pluto (still a planet I think) so that is 3660 million miles * 2 as an average.
The distance that the sun's gravity extends is infinite. I saw where the effect of our sun on another star was calculated to be 3/100 the weight of a flea, that if you could equally separate it into 100 parts, the sun's gravity would equal three of those parts.
The Sun's gravity doesn't 'stop' - gravitational force falls off as distance increases, but it doesn't disappear.
If you want an indicator of the outer 'boundary' of the Solar System - then you are actually referring to the Heliopause.
Our Sun continually ejects a stream of particles called the Solar Wind, and these travel outward into Space. Now, space is not completely 'empty'. There is some Hydrogen & Helium gas is present throughout the galaxy. This is called the Interstellar Medium.
The Heliopause is the demarcation in space where the force of the Solar wind is no longer strong enough to push back the interstellar medium.
For more information than you could possibly want(!) please refer to the Wikipedia article cited below.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/solar_syste...
There is a point at which the gravitational influence of the Sun no longer outweighs the graviational influence of the rest of the galaxy. It's very far away, about 1.5 parsecs, (1) a little over 19 trillion miles, or about 3.26 light years.
A parsec is the distance at which an object shows one second of parallax between either side of the Earth's orbit. If you don't understand parallax, hold your finger at arm's length and close one eye. Look at what the finger blocks against the background. Then close that eye and open the other. Your finger appears to move against the background. Similarly, between July and January, the Earth moves from one side of its orbit to another, a distance of about 186,000,000 miles. Nearby objects appear to move against more distant objects. Objects at 3.25 light years appear to move 1 second of arc against the background.
The Pioneer X spacecraft is moving away from the solar system heading for Aldebaran, in the constellation of Taurus. It is traveling at the rate of about 69,000 mph, and will take 126,000 years to pass the sun's gravitational boundary.
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