Solar System Related Literature

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III. Review of related literature 1. Solar system Our solar system consists of an average star we call the Sun, the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. It includes the satellites of the planets, numerous comets, asteroids, and meteoroids, also the interplanetary medium. According to scientist Pluto is not considered a planet anymore.The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, with internal convective motion that generates a magnetic field. The asteroid belt is thecircumstellardisc in the Solar System located roughly between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter. It is occupied by numerous irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids or minor…show more content…
Just slightly larger than nearby Venus, Earth is the biggest of the terrestrial planets. Our home planet is the only planet in our solar system known to harbor living things. The name Earth is at least 1,000 years old. All of the planets, except for Earth, were named after Greek and Roman gods and goddesses. However, the name Earth is an English/German word, which simply means the ground. Earth has a radius of 3,959 miles (6,371 kilometers), Earth is the biggest of the terrestrial planets, and the fifth largest planet overall. From an average distance of 93 million miles (150 million kilometers), Earth is exactly one astronomical unit away from the sun because one astronomical unit (abbreviated as AU), is the distance from the sun to Earth. This unit provides an easy way to quickly compare planets' distances from the sun. It takes about eight minutes for light from the sun to reach our planet.As Earth orbits the sun, it completes one rotation every 23.9 hours. It takes 365.25 days to complete one trip around the sun. That extra quarter of a day presents a challenge to our calendar system, which counts one year as 365 days. To keep our yearly calendars consistent with our orbit around the sun, every four years we add one day. That day is called a leap day, and the year it's added to is called a leap year.Earth is composed of four main layers, starting with an inner core at the planet's center,…show more content…
For decades, people speculated that bright and dark areas on Mars were patches of vegetation, Mars was a likely place for advanced life forms, and water might exist in the polar caps. When the Mariner 4 spacecraft flew by Mars in 1965, photographs of a bleak, cratered surface shocked many - Mars seemed to be a dead planet. Later missions, however, showed that Mars is a complex planet and holds many mysteries yet to be solved. Chief among them is whether Mars ever had the right conditions to support small life forms called microbes.Mars is a rocky body about half the size of Earth. As with the other terrestrial planets - Mercury, Venus, and Earth - volcanoes, impact craters, crustal movement, and atmospheric conditions such as dust storms have altered the surface of Mars.Mars has two small moons, Phobos and Deimos, that may be captured asteroids. Potato-shaped, they have too little mass for gravity to make them spherical. Phobos, the innermost moon, is heavily cratered, with deep grooves on its surface. Like Earth, Mars experiences seasons due to the tilt of its rotational axis. Mars' orbit is about 1.5 times farther from the sun than Earth's and is slightly elliptical, so its distance from the sun changes. That affects the length of Martian seasons, which vary in length. The polar ice caps on Mars grow and recede with the

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