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solar system
[ soh-ler sis-tuhm ]
noun
- the sun together with all the planets and other bodies that revolve around it.
- a similar system with celestial bodies revolving around a star other than the sun.
solar system
noun
- 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
- 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 .
- See more at nebular hypothesis
- 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
- 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
A Closer Look
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.
Our solar system formed in a mixing bowl of chemical elements that had been building up since the Big Bang.
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.
“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.
Most solar systems put their dense, rocky planets—your Mercuries, your Venuses—up close to their stars.
For that reason, we will never see the formation of another solar system unfold before our eyes.
The Asteroid Belt in the Solar System has many such gaps, created by the gravity of the Sun and Jupiter.
A number of moons in the Solar System have global oceans beneath surfaces of solid ice or ice mixed with other materials.
Most scientists who study the Moon think it formed when a huge impact in the early Solar System broke a chunk of Earth off.
The U.K. has adopted a healthy feed-in tariff that guarantees solar system owners an attractive price for the energy they produce.
There is no reason to suppose that his is the only Solar System: there may be many millions of solar systems.
Reckoning that Neptune is the outermost planet of the solar system, that system would have a diameter of 5,584 millions of miles.
It would require some hours before he attained to the outer limit of the solar system.
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.
The period when our solar system began its individual life was remote beyond the possibility of conception.
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