Solar Systems Explained

Sunlight is a clean, reliable energy source that can be used virtually anywhere. Depending on your home’s energy consumption, you can choose a solar system that will generate enough electricity during the day to pay for itself in utility bill savings over time.

The Solar System contains the Sun, its planets and their moons, an asteroid belt, and other celestial bodies. Astronomers believe it formed 4.6 billion years ago from a giant cloud of gas and dust.

The Sun

The Sun is the dominant component of our solar system. Its nuclear reactions in the core generate massive amounts of heat and light, powering most of the solar system’s functions.

Deep inside the sun, nuclear fusion converts hydrogen into helium. The resulting energy is transferred through a spherical shell called the radiative zone to the top layer of the interior, the convection zone.

The radiation emitted from the sun’s surface reaches Earth and can cause problems for communications, GPS and satellite systems. The sun also releases a steady stream of charged particles, known as solar wind, which extends 10 billion miles from the surface.

The Earth

Our Solar System is the only one we can study in detail by using spacecraft that orbit and land on its planets, as well as Earth-based telescopes. This enables us to scrutinize the diversity of objects that a planetary system can expect to contain, from giant gas and ice planets down to dust particles.

The Sun’s activity creates huge structures like sunspots and eruptions such as flares and coronal mass ejections. It also churns up the Sun’s atmosphere, which is made of layers that differ in temperature and structure.

On the surface of the Sun, convection currents rotate the layers that make up its photosphere and chromosphere. The rotation of these layers causes distortions that produce features like sunspots.

The Moon

The Moon orbits Earth, a relationship that gives rise to the phenomena of lunar and solar eclipses. It is also the source of the tidal force that makes the Moon appear to wax and wane in the sky, creating its phases.

All but the two outer planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) and Pluto have natural satellites (moons). There are over a million asteroids with their own moons that populate a flat asteroid belt.

The Solar System consists of 8 (formerly 9) planets with more than 210 planetary satellites; dozens of asteroids and other minor bodies; comets, and vast reaches of gas and dust known as the interplanetary medium.

The Planets

Around the Sun, a host of smaller objects, including planets and their moons, are moving in relative harmony. The study of these objects is a major area of astronomical research, and one in which astronomers are making significant strides.

Our solar system is thought to have formed about 4.6 billion years ago from a spinning cloud of gas and dust. The gravity of the collapsing cloud caused the material to get hotter and denser, and eventually to fuse into a star.

The four large outer planets are called the gas planets, because they don’t have rocky surfaces. They are mainly big balls of hydrogen and helium.

The Asteroids

Asteroids are rocky leftovers from the solar system’s formation and shed light on what it was like at that time. They’re found mainly in the main asteroid belt, a region that lies 2 1/2 times as far from the Sun as Earth does and is composed of a mix of rocky and metallic objects.

Most asteroids orbit the Sun in highly flattened, or elliptical, circles. Many rotate erratically, tumbling through space as they do so.

Most asteroids have one or more small moons. Some, such as 243 Ida and 253 Mathilde, are so small that they can be seen with a telescope. Other asteroids—like the big four Ceres, Pallas, Vesta and Hygiea—have been mapped by spacecraft.

The Comets

The outer Solar System has many icy comets in regions called the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud. These objects spend most of their time far from the Sun, in orbits that take them outside planetary paths.

When a comet gets close to the Sun, its ices melt and form a bright fuzzy envelope around the nucleus known as a coma. Sunlight can push dust particles from the coma into two tails that point away from the comet. One tail, the ion tail, is blue because the gas in it has been broken apart into charged atoms (ions) by radiation pressure from the Sun.

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