Solar System

Ismael Fernández CaballeroNicolás García López Varela

Andrea Feito Bañón4ºESO B

Introduction

• The Solar System comprises the Sun and its planetary system of eight planets, as well as a number of dwarf planets, moons, and other objects that orbit the Sun. It formed 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of a giant molecular cloud. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun, with most of the remaining mass contained in Jupiter.

• The four smaller inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, also called the terrestrial planets.

• The four outer planets, called the gas giants, are substantially more massive than the terrestrials.

• The two largest, Jupiter and Saturn.• The two outermost planets, Uranus and Neptune.• All planets have almost circular orbits that lie within a nearly

flat disc called the ecliptic plane.

Mercury• Diameter: 4880km• Distance from the Sun: 57.91 million km• Orbital period: 58.646 days

• Mercury is the closest planet to the sun, it has a rocky surface, full with craters. It doesn’t have an atmosphere, so the temperature can change between -183º and 467º.

• There have been two spatial missions, first in 1974 (Mariner 10) and in 2004 (Messenger).

• Its name comes from the roman god of the messengers and the thieves.

• Because of the Sun light it can only be seen during the twilight .

Venus

• Diameter:12104 km• Distance from the Sun: 108.2 million km• Orbital period: 224.7 days

• It has a similar size and composition as de Earth but its surface is always covered by clouds. Because of this clouds temperatures are extremely hot: from 120º to 470º.

• There have been 6 expeditions to Venus.• Its name comes from the roman goddess of beauty and love.

THE EARTH.• It’s the 3rd planet from the Sun.• It’s called the ‘Blue Planet’• Earth formed approximately 4.54 billion years ago• Earth gravitationally interacts with other objects in space,

especially the Sun and the Moon• Earth rotates about its own axis 366.26 times, creating

365.26 solar days

Earth’s composition.

• Earth is a terrestrial planet, meaning that it is a rocky body, rather than a gas giant like Jupiter. It is the largest of the four terrestrial planets in size and mass. Of these four planets, Earth also has the highest density, the highest surface gravity, the strongest magnetic field, and fastest rotation, and is probably the only one with active plate tectonics.

• The mass of the Earth is approximately 5.98×1024 kg.• It is composed mostly of iron (32.1%), oxygen (30.1%), silicon

(15.1%), magnesium (13.9%), sulfur (2.9%), nickel (1.8%), calcium (1.5%), and aluminium (1.4%); with the remaining 1.2% consisting of trace amounts of other elements.

• About 70.8%of the surface is covered by water. The remaining 29.2% (148.94 million km2) not covered by water consists of mountains, deserts, plains, plateaus…

• The Earth provides liquid water, an environment where complex organic molecules can assemble and interact, and sufficient energy to sustain metabolism.

• So we can live in it.

Mars

• Diameter: 6794 km• Distance from the Sun: 227.94 million km• Orbital period: 686.93 days

• It is said that there was once life in Mars, when it had a very similar atmosphere to the Earth and there was water.

• In Mars’ surface there are a lot of volcanoes and dry rivers. Olympus volcano is one of the biggest volcanoes in all the solar system. It has a height of 25 km and a diameter of 600 km.

• It has two satellites: Fobos and Deimos, they are asteroids that are trapped in Mars gravitational field.

Jupiter• Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the

largest planet in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with mass one-thousandth of that of the Sun but is two and a half times the mass of all the other planets in the Solar System combined. Jupiter is classified as a gas giant along with Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Together, these four planets are sometimes referred to as the Jovian or outer planets. The planet was known by astronomers of ancient times, and was associated with the mythology and religious beliefs of many cultures. The Romans named the planet after the Roman god Jupiter.

• Jupiter is primarily composed of hydrogen with a quarter of its mass being helium, although helium only comprises about a tenth of the number of molecules. It may also have a rocky core of heavier elements, but like the other gas giants, Jupiter lacks a well-defined solid surface. Because of its rapid rotation, the planet's shape is that of an oblate spheroid.

• The outer atmosphere is visibly segregated into several bands at different latitudes, resulting in turbulence and storms along their interacting boundaries

• Surrounding Jupiter is a faint planetary ring system and a powerful magnetosphere. There are also at least 67 moons, including the four large moons called the Galilean moons that were first discovered by Galileo in 1610. Ganymede, the largest of these moons, has a diameter greater than that of the planet Mercury.

Saturn.

• Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest planet in the Solar System.

• It’s a gas giant made up mostly of hydrogen and helium.• It has the lowest density of all the planets, and is the only one

less dense than water.• It spins faster than any other planet except Jupiter, completing

a rotation roughly every 10-and-a-half hours.

Composition and structure.

-96.3 percent molecular hydrogen, 3.25 percent helium, minor amounts of methane, ammonia, hydrogen deuteride, ethane, ammonia ice aerosols, water ice aerosols, ammonia hydrosulfide aerosols.Saturn seems to have a hot solid inner core of iron and rocky material surrounded by an outer core probably composed of ammonia, methane, and water.Average distance from the sun: 885,904,700 milesSaturn has at least 62 moons.Saturn actually has many rings made of billions of particles of ice and rock, ranging in size from a grain of sugar to the size of a house.

• The first spacecraft to reach Saturn was Pioneer 11 in 1979, flying within 13,700 miles (22,000 km) of it, which discovered the planet's two of its outer rings as well as the presence of a strong magnetic field.

Uranus• Uranus is the seventh planet

from the Sun. It has the third-largest planetary radius and fourth-largest planetary mass in the Solar System. Uranus is similar in composition to Neptune, and both are of different chemical composition than the larger gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. For this reason, astronomers place them in a category called "ice giants".

• It is the only planet whose name is derived from a figure from Greek mythology rather than Roman mythology like the other planets, from the Latinized version of the Greek god of the sky, Ouranos.

• Like the other giant planets, Uranus has a ring system, a magnetosphere, and numerous moons.

• The Uranian system has a unique configuration among those of the planets because its axis of rotation is tilted sideways, nearly into the plane of its revolution about the Sun.

• It is the coldest planetary atmosphere in the Solar System, with a minimum temperature of 49 K (−224.2 °C), and has a complex, layered cloud structure, with water thought to make up the lowest clouds, and methane the uppermost layer of clouds. In contrast, the interior of Uranus is mainly composed of ices and rock.

• Uranus's atmosphere, apart of containing hydrogen and helium, contains more "ices" such as water, ammonia, and methane, along with traces of hydrocarbons.

Neptune.• The planet Neptune was discovered on Sept. 23, 1846.• Neptune is the eighth and farthest planet from the Sun in the

Solar System.• Neptune goes around the sun once roughly every 165 Earth

years.• COMPOSITION:• Hydrogen - 80 percent; Helium - 19.0 percent; Methane - 1.5

percent• Neptune has 13 known moons.• Neptune's unusual rings are not uniform, but possess bright

thick clumps of dust called arcs.• NASA's Voyager 2 space satellite was the first and as yet only

spacecraft to visit Neptune on Aug. 25, 1989.