solar system

[ soh-ler sis-tuhm ]

noun

1. the sun together with all the planets and other bodies that revolve around it.
2. a similar system with celestial bodies revolving around a star other than the sun.

solar system

noun

1. the system containing the sun and the bodies held in its gravitational field, including the planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune), the dwarf planets (Eris, Pluto, and Ceres), the asteroids, and comets

solar system

1. Often Solar System. The Sun together with the eight planets, their moons, and all other bodies that orbit it, including dwarf planets, asteroids, comets, meteoroids, and Kuiper belt objects. The outer limit of the solar system is formed by the heliopause .
2. See more at nebular hypothesis
3. A similar system surrounding another star. Over two dozen stars are known to have planets in orbit around them, though none is known to have as extensive or diverse a group of orbiting bodies as the Sun's system.

solar system

1. The region of the universe near the sun that includes the sun, the nine known major planets and their moons or satellites , and objects such as asteroids and comets that travel in independent orbits . The major planets, in order of their average distance from the sun, are Mercury , Venus , the Earth , Mars , Jupiter , Saturn , Uranus , Neptune , and Pluto .

Word History and Origins

Origin of solar system¹

First recorded in 1695–1705

A Closer Look

The solar system consists of much more than just the Sun and planets. It contains billions of other objects and extends far beyond the outermost planets. Several hundred thousand asteroids revolve around the Sun in orbits mainly between Mars and Jupiter. Countless smaller meteoroids, including cometary debris and fragments from the collision of larger bodies, are also present, some of which approach Earth's orbit closely enough to be known as near Earth objects . In addition, as many as a billion objects, most the size of a speck of dust, cross through our atmosphere as meteors or micrometeoroids each day, though the vast majority are invisible to observers on the ground. Astronomers have recorded more than 800 comets passing through the inner part of the solar system. Billions more lie in the area surrounding the solar system, in the disk of debris known as the Kuiper belt and in the swarm of comets known as the Oort cloud. All of these objects orbit the Sun at high speeds. Some orbits, like those of the planets near the Sun, are almost circular. Other orbits, like those of comets that make their way in among the planets, are stretched out into long ellipses. As in most scientific fields, new discoveries are constantly changing our understanding and definitions. The objects in the Kuiper belt, for example, were discovered in the 1990s. When the new planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History opened in 2000, many visitors were shocked to find that Pluto, long known as the ninth planet, had been demoted. In 2006 the International Astronomical Union classified Pluto as a dwarf planet.

Example Sentences

New studies of the makeup of worlds orbiting two different stars show a wide range of planetary possibilities, all of them different from our solar system.

From Science News

Our solar system formed in a mixing bowl of chemical elements that had been building up since the Big Bang.

From Quanta Magazine

The biggest questions in space science—how the solar system formed, how it led to life on Earth, and whether there’s ever been life on other nearby worlds—can really only be answered with direct study of the materials from those worlds.

From MIT Technology Review

“It is a very exciting finding and, if confirmed, suggests that Mars could enter the pantheon of currently volcanically active worlds within our solar system,” said Christopher Hamilton, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona.

From Quanta Magazine

Most solar systems put their dense, rocky planets—your Mercuries, your Venuses—up close to their stars.

From Popular-Science

For that reason, we will never see the formation of another solar system unfold before our eyes.

From The Daily Beast

The Asteroid Belt in the Solar System has many such gaps, created by the gravity of the Sun and Jupiter.

From The Daily Beast

A number of moons in the Solar System have global oceans beneath surfaces of solid ice or ice mixed with other materials.

From The Daily Beast

Most scientists who study the Moon think it formed when a huge impact in the early Solar System broke a chunk of Earth off.

From The Daily Beast

The U.K. has adopted a healthy feed-in tariff that guarantees solar system owners an attractive price for the energy they produce.

From The Daily Beast

There is no reason to suppose that his is the only Solar System: there may be many millions of solar systems.

From Project Gutenberg

Reckoning that Neptune is the outermost planet of the solar system, that system would have a diameter of 5,584 millions of miles.

From Project Gutenberg

It would require some hours before he attained to the outer limit of the solar system.

From Project Gutenberg

We shall therefore now turn to a description of the portion of the starry world which is found in the limits of our solar system.

From Project Gutenberg

The period when our solar system began its individual life was remote beyond the possibility of conception.

From Project Gutenberg

Related Words

• earth