What Are The Different Types Of Solar Power
3 Types of Residential Solar Electric Power Systems. There are three main types of residential solar electric power systems: grid inter-tied grid inter-tied with battery backup and off-grid. These three broad types vary in how closely connected they are to the traditional power utility infrastructure, known as the grid.
What are the different types of solar panel mounting systems?
1 Solar panel installation suitable for sloped roof. Most houses have a sloped roof design. 2 Railed mounting system. The most common roof mounted structure of all. 3 Rail-less mounting system. This type of installation directly uses bolts and screws to secure each panel to the roof. 4 Shared-rail mounting system. 5 Flat roof.
Which is the most common application of solar panels?
The most general application of solar panels is solar water heating systems. Following are the different types of solar panels classified according to the generation of solar panel:
The Solar System: Facts About Our Cosmic Neighborhood
Here’s a look at our solar system, from the scorching surface of Venus to the home of the largest volcano.
The solar system is a collection of planets, moons, asteroids, comets, dust and gas that orbit our local star, the sun. It includes the rocky inner planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn and the ice giants Uranus and Neptune.
Between Mars and Jupiter is a collection of asteroids known as the asteroid belt, while beyond Neptune is where small icy bodies, like Pluto and comets, live.
Earth: Our Home Planet Filled With Life
– Discovery: Known to the ancient Greeks and visible to the naked eye
– Named for the Roman god of war
– Diameter: 4,217 miles
– Day: Just more than one Earth day
– Number of moons: 2
Scientists also think ancient Mars would have had the conditions to support life like bacteria and other microbes. Hope that signs of this past life and the possibility of even current lifeforms may exist on the Red Planet has driven numerous and the Red Planet is now one of the most explored planets in the solar system.
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Comet Tempel : We Did It
Scientists have long known we can learn a lot from impact craters so, in 2005, they made one themselves and watched it happen.
On July 4, 2005, NASAs Deep Impact spacecraft trained its instruments on an 816-pound copper impactor as it smashed into comet Tempel 1.
One of the more surprising findings: The comet has a loose, fluffy structure, held together by gravity, and contains a surprising amount of organic compounds that are part of the basic building blocks of life.
Solar System Formation And Discovery
Approximately 4.5 billion years ago a dark cloud of gas and dust began to collapse. As it shrank, the cloud flattened into a swirling disk known as a solar nebula, according to NASA Science .
The heat and pressure eventually became so high that hydrogen atoms began to combine to form helium. The nuclear reactions released vast amounts of energy and our sun was formed.
The sun accumulated about 99% of the available matter and the remaining material further from the sun formed smaller clumps inside the spinning disk. Some of these clumps gained enough mass that their gravity shaped them into spheres, becoming planets, dwarf planets and moons. Other leftover pieces became asteroids, comets and smaller moons that make up our solar system.
Read more: How did the solar system form?
For millennia, astronomers have followed points of light that seemed to move among the stars. The ancient Greeks named them planets, meaning “wanderers.” Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were known in antiquity, and the invention of the telescope added the Asteroid Belt, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and many of these worlds’ moons. The dawn of the space age saw dozens of probes launched to explore our system, an adventure that continues today.
There have been five human-made objects so far, Voyager 1, Voyager 2, New Horizons, Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, that have crossed the threshold into interstellar space.
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Distribution Of The Asteroids
The Solar System is divided into two well-defined parts. There are four relatively small, rocky planets: Mercury, Venus, the Earth, and Mars. Then come the four giants: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter thousands of asteroids, otherwise known as minor planets, make up what is known as the main belt . Of the main belt asteroids, only one is as much as 900 km in diameter, and only one is ever visible with the naked eye. Some of the larger main belt asteroids are listed in Table 1.
Figure 1. Distribution of asteroids.
Table 1. Some of the larger Main-Belt ateroids
| Asteroid |
|---|
q = perihelion distance, in astronomical units.
Q = aphelion distance, in astronomical units.
M = mean magnitude at opposition.
T = type .
Some small asteroids can leave the main belt, and swing closer to the Sun they may even approach the Earth, and collision cannot be ruled out . All of these Near Earth Approach asteroids are very small indeed. There are asteroids known as Trojans which share the orbits of major planets others have very eccentric orbits which take them into the far reaches of the Solar System, and recently it has been found that there are asteroid-sized bodies near and well beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto. These make up what is known as the Kuiper Belt.
Eberhard Grün, in, 2007
Our Solar System’s Planets
Eight confirmed planets and many dwarf planets orbit the sun. According to NASA , “the order and arrangement of the planets and other bodies in our solar system is due to the way the solar system formed.” Rocky materials could withstand the young sun’s immense heat, so the first four planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are small, with rocky surfaces. Beyond them, “materials we are used to seeing as ice, liquid or gas settled in the outer regions of the young solar system,” NASA says, namely the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn and the ice giants Uranus and Neptune.
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Types Of Planets In The Solar System
The inner four planets closest to the sun Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are often called the “terrestrial planets” because their surfaces are rocky. Pluto also has a rocky, albeit frozen, surface but has never been grouped with the four terrestrials.
The four large outer worlds Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are sometimes called the Jovian or “Jupiter-like” planets because of their enormous size relative to the terrestrial planets. They’re also mostly made of gases like hydrogen, helium and ammonia rather than of rocky surfaces, although astronomers believe some or all of them may have solid cores.
If you were to order the planets by size from smallest to largest they would be Mercury, Mars, Venus, Earth, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter.
Jupiter and Saturn are sometimes called the gas giants, whereas the more distant Uranus and Neptune have been nicknamed the ice giants. This is because Uranus and Neptune have more atmospheric water and other ice-forming molecules, such as methane, hydrogen sulfide and phosphene, that crystallize into clouds in the planets’ frigid conditions, according to the Planetary Society . For perspective, methane crystallizes at minus 296 Fahrenheit , according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine .
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.
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What Does The Solar System Consist Of
The solar system also contains 8 planets which are large almost spherical objects that revolve around the sun in elliptical paths known as orbits. The earth is also one of the planets and lies at a distance from the sun such that it is neither too hot nor too cold for life to exist. The planets were formed at least 4.6 billion years ago when discs of dust and gas orbiting around the sun collapsed and clumped together due to gravity. There are two kinds of planets:
The solar system also contains small irregularly shaped objects made of rock, metal, and carbon called asteroids orbiting the sun. Most of these objects lie between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt.
To Know Awesome Facts About The Sun, Watch The Below Video:
The Solar System Today
The Solar System as we know it today consists of the Sun, the eight planets and their moons, asteroids, comets, dwarf planets, and other assorted objects in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud beyond Neptune. The eight planets all orbit the Sun in the same direction and in the same plane, known as the ecliptic. The axis of rotation for most of the planets is nearly perpendicular to the ecliptic. The only exception is Uranus, which rotates on its side for unknown reasons.
The Sun is the power plant that drives the Solar System. Its immense gravity holds the planets in orbit. Its energy drives weather systems on the planets with atmospheres. The Sun also provides energy for the vast majority of life on Earth. Without the Sun, it is unlikely that there would be any life forms inhabiting our blue planet.
The Solar System is divided into two main regions. The inner planets consist of the four rocky, or terrestrial planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, while the outer planets consists of the two gas giant planets, Jupiter, Saturn, and the two ice giant planets, Uranus, and Neptune. The asteroid belt divides these two regions. The inner planets are composed mainly of rocky materials such as silicates in their outer crusts and mantles and metals such as iron and nickel in their in their inner cores. The outer planets are composed mainly of gases such as hydrogen and helium.
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What Has Hubble Learned About Plutos Neighborhood
We think we know Pluto. It’s the smallest ball in our old solar system models. Its a chunk of ice, rock, and hydrocarbons that drifts 4.67 billion miles from Earth at its orbits farthest point. It’s the tiny former planet that stirred up controversy when it was reclassified as both a dwarf planet and a member of the collection of icy cosmic objects we call the Kuiper Belt.
But Pluto and the Kuiper Belt still hold most of their secrets. Before the New Horizons mission flew through the dwarf planet’s system in July 2015, astronomers had to rely on other ground- and space-based observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope, to investigate those distant reaches of our solar system.
Hubble observations of Pluto in 2005 revealed two never-before-seen moons: Nix and Hydra. Six years later, in 2011, Hubble’s keen vision found another moon, designated Kerberos, while searching Pluto for rings. In 2012, Hubble discovered tiny Styx while looking for potential hazards for the New Horizons spacecraft.This discovery expanded the size of Pluto’s known satellite system to five moons, including its largest, Charon, which was discovered in 1978 and first imaged by Hubble shortly after launch in 1990. With five moons now known in the Pluto system, scientists are intrigued that such a small planet can have such a complex collection of satellites.
Uranus: The Tilted Sideways Planet In Our Solar System
– Day: 18 Earth hours
– Number of moons: 27
Astronomers believe an object twice the size of Earth collided with Uranus roughly 4 billion years ago, causing Uranus to tilt. That tilt causes extreme seasons that last 20-plus years, and the sun beats down on one pole or the other for 84 Earth-years at a time.
The collision is also thought to have knocked rock and ice into Uranus’ orbit. These later became some of the planet’s 27 moons. Methane in Uranus’ atmosphere gives the planet its blue-green tint. It also has 13 sets of faint rings.
Uranus holds the record for the coldest temperature ever measured in the solar system minus 371.56 degrees F . The average temperature of Uranus is minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit .
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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 .
Interstellar Dust In The Heliosphere
The solar system is currently passing through a region of low-density, weakly ionized interstellar material in our galaxy, which shows a larger abundance of heavy refractory elements in the gas phase such as iron, magnesium, and silicon than in cold dense interstellar clouds. Interstellar dust is part of the interstellar medium, although it has not been directly observed by astronomical means in the tenuous local interstellar cloud. Interstellar dust is formed as stardust in the cool atmospheres of giant stars and in nova and supernova explosions.
More than a decade ago, interstellar dust was positively identified inside the planetary system. At the distance of Jupiter, the dust detector on board the Ulysses spacecraft detected impacts predominantly from a direction that was opposite to the expected impact direction of interplanetary dust grains. The impact velocities exceeded the local solar system escape velocity, even if radiation pressure effects were considered. The motion of interstellar grains through the solar system is parallel to the flow of neutral interstellar hydrogen and helium gas, both traveling at a speed of 26 km/s with respect to the Sun. The interstellar dust flow persisted at higher latitudes above the ecliptic plane, even over the poles of the Sun, whereas interplanetary dust is strongly concentrated toward the ecliptic plane .
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Observing In Our Own Celestial Backyard
On first glance, our solar system seems to be well understood. It includes a single star, planets, their moons, dwarf planets like Pluto and Ceres, and smaller bodies like asteroids, comets, and the outer solar system Kuiper Belt objects. Yet, scientists continue to discover fascinating new findings about our solar system, and Hubble has contributed to these discoveries. For example, researchers used Hubble to study the trajectory of an mysterious object called Oumuamua as it passed through the inner solar system. They are confident that this body is from another star system and has traveled into our solar system from interstellar space.
Composition Of The Solar System
Located at the centre of the solar system and influencing the motion of all the other bodies through its gravitational force is the Sun, which in itself contains more than 99 percent of the mass of the system. The planets, in order of their distance outward from the Sun, are Mercury, Venus, Earth, , Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Four planetsJupiter through Neptunehave ring systems, and all but Mercury and Venus have one or more moons. Pluto had been officially listed among the planets since it was discovered in 1930 orbiting beyond Neptune, but in 1992 an icy object was discovered still farther from the Sun than Pluto. Many other such discoveries followed, including an object named Eris that appears to be at least as large as Pluto. It became apparent that Pluto was simply one of the larger members of this new group of objects, collectively known as the Kuiper belt. Accordingly, in August 2006 the International Astronomical Union , the organization charged by the scientific community with classifying astronomical objects, voted to revoke Plutos planetary status and place it under a new classification called dwarf planet. For a discussion of that action and of the definition of planet approved by the IAU, seeplanet.
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