Thursday, March 21, 2024

The Earth In The Solar System

Eosc 310 The Earth And The Solar System

The Largest Waterfall in the Solar System | The Planets | Earth Lab

In this course, we will explore the history of our universe and what allowed Earth to host intelligent life. Through this course, I would like you to be able to do two things:

I. Tell the story of how our planet formed and how we came to inhabit it. There are some parts of the story that we know well – the Big Bang, evolution, and plate tectonics – and there are other parts that we don’t fully understand – the origin of life, the origin of the atmosphere, and the relative timing of ice ages throughout Earth’s history.

II. Understand where we as humans fit into the story of planetary evolution. Specifically, how we have impacted our planet and how our impact compares with events from the past. I’d like you to appreciate how we can be more than consumers of Earth’s resources and how we can alter the way with which we interact with our planet. Also, I would like you to know what it means for intelligent life to exist elsewhere in the galaxy?

How Did Our Solar System Form

Scientists think the solar system formed when a nearby exploding star, called a supernova, triggered the collapse of the solar nebula. According to this theory, the explosion sent shock waves through space, and those shock waves pushed parts of the nebula closer together, leading to collapse. The supernova may have even seeded material into the nebula, Live Science previously reported. For instance, scientists have found that aluminum-26, an element formed only in the hearts of stars, most likely originated from a series of nearby supernovas, Live Science sister site Space.com reported .

What Is The Solar System

The Solar System includes the Sun, the Earth and all of the other planets, asteroids and comets that go around and around it.

You may think that the Earth is a pretty big place, but the Earth isnt even the biggest planet in the Solar System. The biggest planet is Jupiter you could fit 1,321 Earths inside Jupiter. The Sun is even bigger than Jupiter it would take 1.3 million planets the size of Earth to fill the same volume as the Sun.

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The Solar System Explained

Astronomers sometimes use light that can’t be seen by humans to learn more about objects in space. This picture of the sun was taken using only ultraviolet light. As you can tell, it looks different from a picture using visible light. See more .

Our planet Earth is part of a solar system that consists of nine planets orbiting a giant, fiery star we call the sun. For thousands of years, astronomers studying the solar system have noticed that these planets march across the sky in a predictable way. They’ve also noticed that some move faster than others . . . and some seem to be moving backward.

After Core Hydrogen Exhaustion

Solar System

The Sun does not have enough mass to explode as a supernova. Instead, when it runs out of hydrogen in the core in approximately 5 billion years, core hydrogen fusion will stop, and there will be nothing to prevent the core from contracting. The release of gravitational potential energy will cause the luminosity of the Sun to increase, ending the main sequence phase and leading the Sun to expand over the next billion years: first into a subgiant, and then into a red giant. The heating due to gravitational contraction will also lead to hydrogen fusion in a shell just outside the core, where unfused hydrogen remains, contributing to the increased luminosity, which will eventually reach more than 1,000 times its present luminosity. When the Sun enters its red-giant branch phase, it will engulf Mercury and Venus, reaching about 0.75 AU . The Sun will spend around a billion years in the RGB and lose around a third of its mass.

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The Edge Of The Solar System

Past the Kuiper Belt is the very edge of the solar system, the heliosphere, a vast, teardrop-shaped region of space containing electrically charged particles given off by the sun. Many astronomers think that the limit of the heliosphere, known as the heliopause, is about 9 billion miles from the sun.

The Oort Cloud lies well past the Kuiper Belt, considered to be located between 2,000 and 5,000 astronomical units from the sun. The outer edge of the Oort Cloud may reach as far as 10,000 up to 100,000 AU from the sun. One AU is equal to approximately 93,000,000 miles . The Oort Cloud is home to billions, or even trillions of objects, according to NASA Science .

Saturn: The Ringed Jewel Of The Solar System

– Day: About 10.5 Earth hours

– Number of moons: 82

If you put Saturn in a bathtub it would float as Saturn has an average density that is less than water. You’d just need to find a bathtub big enough

When polymath Galileo Galilei first studied Saturn in the early 1600s, he thought it was an object with three parts: a planet and two large moons on either side. Not knowing he was seeing a planet with rings, the stumped astronomer entered a small drawing a symbol with one large circle and two smaller ones in his notebook, as a noun in a sentence describing his discovery. More than 40 years later, Christiaan Huygens proposed that they were rings.

The rings are made of ice and rock and scientists are not yet sure how they formed. The gaseous planet is mostly hydrogen and helium and has numerous moons.

Related: How far away is Saturn?

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The Earth In The Solar System Class 6 Notes Social Science Geography Chapter 1

Solar SystemThe sun, nine planets, satellites, asteroids and meteoroids form the solar system.

The Sun

  • The sun is in the center of the solar system.
  • It is made up of extremely hot gases.
  • The sun is about 150 million km away from the earth.

Planets

  • There are nine planets in our solar system.
  • The nine planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.
  • Planets move around the sun in a fixed orbit.
  • Mercury is the nearest planet.
  • Pluto is the farthest planet.
  • A new planet 2003 UB313 has been discovered. It is bigger than Pluto and is farthest from the sun.

Earth

  • It is the third nearest planet to the sun and fifth largest planet of our solar system.
  • The earth is a unique planet because it supports life.
  • It is also called the blue planet.
  • Its shape is Geoid.
  • It is the only satellite of the earth.
  • Its diameter is one-quarter of the earth.
  • It is about 3.84,400 km away from us.
  • It moves around the earth in about 27 days.
  • Only one side of the moon is visible to us on the earth.
  • No life exists on moon as it has neither water nor air.

Asteroids

  • They are numerous tiny bodies which move around the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
  • The largest asteroid is the Ceres.

Meteoroids

  • The small pieces of rocks which move around the sun are called meteoroids.
  • Our solar system is a part of the Milky Way galaxy.
  • Milky Way galaxy was named Akash Ganga.
  • There are millions of galaxies that make the Universe.

All the planets of the solar system are listed below:

Protective Fields And Gases

What If Earth got Kicked Out of the Solar System? Rogue Earth

Earth’s atmosphere is 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, and one percent other gases such as carbon dioxide, water vapor, and argon. Much like a greenhouse, this blanket of gases absorbs and retains heat. On average, Earth’s surface temperature is about 57 degrees Fahrenheit without our atmosphere, it’d be zero degrees. In the last two centuries, humans have added enough greenhouse gases to the atmosphere to raise Earth’s average temperature . This extra heat has altered Earth’s weather patterns in many ways.

The atmosphere not only nourishes life on Earth, but it also protects it: It’s thick enough that many meteorites burn up before impact from friction, and its gasessuch as ozoneblock DNA-damaging ultraviolet light from reaching the surface. But for all that our atmosphere does, it’s surprisingly thin. Ninety percent of Earth’s atmosphere lies within just 10 miles of the planet’s surface.

The silhouette of a woman is seen on a Norwegian island beneath the Northern Lights .

We also enjoy protection from Earth’s magnetic field, generated by our planet’s rotation and its iron-nickel core. This teardrop-shaped field shields Earth from high-energy particles launched at us from the sun and elsewhere in the cosmos. But due to the field’s structure, some particles get funneled to Earth’s Poles and collide with our atmosphere, yielding aurorae, the natural fireworks show known by some as the northern lights.

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Our Live Solar System Map

If you have our desktop version enabled on your computer, then the application shown above plots the position of the Earth and planets using data from this NASA’s JPL website and is accurate between 3000 BCE and 3000 CE. If you have our mobile version enabled then we’ll be showing you a simpler view of the solar system showing you the current planetary positions with the option of moving up to 30 days forwards or backwards.

Characteristics Of The Solar System And The Universe

The teacher understands the characteristics of the solar system and the universe.

The universe is defined as everything that exists. It includes all matter found in galaxies and in intergalactic space. The directory of observable objects in the universe is vast. The smallest components are atomic particles followed by atoms , molecules, dust, space rocks, comets, asteroids, moons, dwarf planets, planets, solar systems, stars, black holes, nebulae, and galaxies. This ordinary matter is thought to comprise only about 5% of the total universe. The rest is theorized to consist of dark energy and dark matter.

While universe is defined as everything, there are various multiverse theories that suggest that our universe might be one of many universes that exist, each with different forms of matter and different scientific laws at work.

NASA provides a good overview of the universe, in Universe 101.

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Our Solar System Is Even Stranger Than We Thought

New research shows a pattern of exoplanet sizes and spacing around other stars unlike what we see in our own system

How special is the solar system? The history of astronomy has mostly been a one-way journey from a worldview in which our solar system is orderly to a view in which we are not special. Our solar systems planets, once thought to dance in god-ordained perfect circles in a music of the spheres, deviate from circular orbits. Johannes Kepler, who demonstrated the non-circular orbits of the planets, tried to restore a sense of heavenliness by latching onto a new pattern for their orbits based on Platos mathematical solidsbut that notion was discredited many years later with the discovery of Uranus.

So when, on a sunny afternoon in California last year, I discovered a set of patterns that seem to rule planetary systems other than our own, I was skeptical. Were these patterns real, or were they an illusion? And if real, what did they mean about our solar systems place in the cosmos?

The pattern I found on that sunny afternoon: planets in the same system tend to be the same size. For example, if one planet is 1.5 times the radius of Earth, the other planets in the system are very likely to be 1.5 times the radius of Earth, plus or minus a little bit.

The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Question : How Does A Planet Differ From A Star

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Answer: The difference between a planet and a star is given below:

Star Planet
Some celestial bodies are very big and hot. They are made up of gases. They have their own heat and light, which they emit in large amounts. These celestial bodies are called stars. Some celestial bodies do not have their own heat and light. They are lit by the light of the stars. Such bodies are called planets.
Example Sun Example Earth, Mars

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Many Layers Many Features

About 4.5 billion years ago, gravity coaxed Earth to form from the gaseous, dusty disk that surrounded our young sun. Over time, Earth’s interiorwhich is made mostly of silicate rocks and metalsdifferentiated into four layers.

At the planet’s heart lies the inner core, a solid sphere of iron and nickel that’s 759 miles wide and as hot as 9,800 degrees Fahrenheit. The inner core is surrounded by the outer core, a 1,400-mile-thick band of iron and nickel fluids. Beyond the outer core lies the mantle, a 1,800-mile-thick layer of viscous molten rock on which Earth’s outermost layer, the crust, rests. On land, the continental crust is an average of 19 miles thick, but the oceanic crust that forms the seafloor is thinnerabout three miles thickand denser.

Like Venus and Mars, Earth has mountains, valleys, and volcanoes. But unlike its rocky siblings, almost 70 percent of Earth’s surface is covered in oceans of liquid water that average 2.5 miles deep. These bodies of water contain 97 percent of Earth’s volcanoes and the mid-ocean ridge, a massive mountain range more than 40,000 miles long.

Planet Earth’s Orbit Around The Sun

While Earth orbits the sun, the planet is simultaneously spinning around an imaginary line called an axis that runs through the core, from the North Pole to the South Pole. It takes Earth 23.934 hours to complete a rotation on its axis and 365.26 days to complete an orbit around the sun our days and years on Earth are defined by these gyrations.

Earth’s axis of rotation is tilted in relation to the ecliptic plane, an imaginary surface through the planet’s orbit around the sun. This means the Northern and Southern hemispheres will sometimes point toward or away from the sun depending on the time of year, and this changes the amount of light the hemispheres receive, resulting in the changing seasons.

Earth happens to orbit the sun within the so-called “Goldilocks zone,” where temperatures are just right to maintain liquid water on our planet’s surface. Earth’s orbit is not a perfect circle, but rather a slightly oval-shaped ellipse, similar to the orbits of all the other planets in our solar system. Our planet is a bit closer to the sun in early January and farther away in July, although this proximity has a much smaller effect on the temperatures we experience on the planet’s surface than does the tilt of Earth’s axis.

Statistics about Earth’s orbit, according to NASA:

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Pluto: Once A Planet Now A Dwarf Planet

– Day: 6.4 Earth days

– Number of moons: 5

It is smaller than Earth’s moon its orbit is highly elliptical, falling inside Neptune’s orbit at some points and far beyond it at others and Pluto’s orbit doesn’t fall on the same plane as all the other planets instead, it orbits 17.1 degrees above or below.

It is smaller than Earth’s moon its orbit is highly elliptical, falling inside Neptune’s orbit at some points and far beyond it at others and Pluto’s orbit doesn’t fall on the same plane as all the other planets instead, it orbits 17.1 degrees above or below, taking 288 years to complete a single orbit according to ESA.

From 1979 until early 1999, Pluto had been the eighth planet from the sun. Then, on Feb. 11, 1999, it crossed Neptune’s path and once again became the solar system’s most distant planet until it was redefined as a dwarf planet. It’s a cold, rocky world with a tenuous atmosphere.

Scientists thought it might be nothing more than a hunk of rock on the outskirts of the solar system. But when NASA’s New Horizons mission performed history’s first flyby of the Pluto system on July 14, 2015, it transformed scientists’ view of Pluto.

Pluto is a very active ice world that’s covered in glaciers, mountains of ice water, icy dunes and possibly even cryovolcanoes that erupt icy lava made of water, methane or ammonia.

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Planets In Our Solar System

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Each planet in our solar system is unique, but they all have a few things in common, too. For example, every planet has a north and a south pole. These points are in the center of the planet at its ends. A planet’s axis is an imaginary line that runs through the center of the planet and connects the north and south poles. The imaginary line that runs around the planet at its middle is called its equator. While every planet rotates on its axis, some planets rotate quickly and some rotate slowly. The time that it takes for a planet to rotate once on its axis is its rotation period. For most planets in our solar system, the rotation period is close to the length of its day. Mercury and Venus are exceptions.

As each planet in our solar system rotates on its axis, it also revolves around the sun. The time that it takes for a planet to make a complete revolution around the sun is the planet’s year. The path that the planet follows around the sun is called its orbit. Different planets have different orbits and orbits can take different shapes. Some orbits are nearly circular and some are more elliptical .

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