Interesting facts about Solar system The solar system is made up of the sun and everything that orbits around it, including planets, moons, asteroids, comets and meteoroids. It extends from the sun, called Sol by the ancient Romans, and goes past the four inner planets, through the Asteroid Belt to the four gas giants and on to the disk-shaped Kuiper Belt and far beyond to the teardrop-shaped heliopause. Scientists estimate that the edge of the solar system is about 9 billion miles (15 billion kilometers) from the sun. Beyond the heliopause lies the giant, spherical Oort Cloud, which is thought to surround the solar system.
Discovery of planets.
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.
The discovery of Eris kicked off a rash of new discoveries of dwarf planets, and eventually led to the International Astronomical Union revising the definition of a "planet." The revision changed Pluto's status from planet to dwarf planet in 2006, a decision that remains controversial – especially after the New Horizons mission found immense geological variety on the world in 2015. [Infographic: Structure of the Solar System]
Formation of planets and moons.
Many scientists think our solar system formed from a giant, rotating cloud of gas and dust known as the solar nebula. As the nebula collapsed because of its gravity, it spun faster and flattened into a disk. Most of the material was pulled toward the center to form the sun. Other particles within the disk collided and stuck together to form asteroid-sized objects named as planetesimals, some of which combined to become the asteroids, comets, moons and planets.
The solar wind from the sun was so powerful that it swept away most of the lighter elements, such as hydrogen and helium, from the innermost planets, leaving behind mostly small, rocky worlds. however, resulting in gas giants made up mostly of hydrogen and helium.
Earth, our home, is the third planet from the sun. It's the only planet known to have an atmosphere containing free oxygen, oceans of water on its surface and, of course, life.
Earth is the fifth largest of the planets in the solar system. It's smaller than the four gas giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — but larger than the three other rocky planets, Mercury, Mars and Venus.
Earth has a diameter of roughly 8,000 miles (13,000 kilometers) and is round because gravity pulls matter into a ball. But, it's not perfectly round. Earth is really an "oblate spheroid," because its spin causes it to be squashed at its poles and swollen at the equator.
Water covers roughly 71 percent of Earth's surface, and most of that is in the ocean
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