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Your message to the editors. Your email only if you want to be contacted back. Send Feedback. The sixth planet from the sun, Saturn is known most for its rings. When polymath Galileo Galilei first studied Saturn in the early s, 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. The seventh planet from the sun, Uranus is an oddball.
It has clouds made of hydrogen sulfide, the same chemical that makes rotten eggs smell so foul. It rotates from east to west like Venus. But unlike Venus or any other planet, its equator is nearly at right angles to its orbit — it basically orbits on its side.
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 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 the atmosphere gives Uranus its blue-green tint. It also has 13 sets of faint rings.
The eighth planet from the sun, Neptune is about the size of Uranus and is known for supersonic strong winds. Neptune is far out and cold. The planet is more than 30 times as far from the sun as Earth. Neptune was the first planet predicted to exist by using math, before it was visually detected. Irregularities in the orbit of Uranus led French astronomer Alexis Bouvard to suggest some other planet might be exerting a gravitational tug.
German astronomer Johann Galle used calculations to help find Neptune in a telescope. Neptune is about 17 times as massive as Earth and has a rocky core. Once the ninth planet from the sun, Pluto is unlike other planets in many respects. It is smaller than Earth's moon; its orbit is highly elliptical, falling inside Neptune's orbit at some points and far beyond it at others; and Pluto's orbit doesn't fall on the same plane as all the other planets — instead, it orbits From until early , Pluto had actually been the eighth planet from the sun.
Just imagine our Earth being four times bigger, at least, how many species could there have been in such a world. You could say that there are 13 planets in our Solar System, maybe even more. The dwarf planets Ceres , Haumea , Makemake , and Eris , are also orbiting our Sun, so there are actually 13 planets in our Solar System.
Some consider that the biggets moon of Pluto, named Charon, might also be a dwarf planet. Regardless of its classification, Charon is even bigger than Ceres. Ceres is an attractive dwarf planet since it is also classified as an asteroid, the biggest yet discovered. Some believe that life may have come from Ceres through the process of panspermia. Some of them have been classified as asteroids, comets, but many are possible dwarf plantes.
If this is true, then our Solar System really seems like a crowded place. Who knows what we will discover in the future and if the hypothetical Planet X will also be debunked one day. How Many Planets are in our Solar System? Rocks from Vesta -- Part 2: Howardites.
The Stuff of Rings. Cassini spent more than a decade examining them more closely than any spacecraft before it. Translucent Arcs. As it swooped past the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus on July 14, , Cassini acquired increasingly high-resolution views of this puzzling ice world.
These views have been combined into th Zooming in on Enceladus. Supermoon Lunar Eclipse The Atlas Ring. Less than 20 minutes after Cassini's close approach to Titan on March 31, , its cameras captured this view of Saturn through Titan's upper atmosphere. The northern part of Saturn's disk can be Saturn Through the Haze. This shadowy scene is one of the Cassini spacecraft's closest views of Saturn's moon Janus.
The slopes of some craters here display hints of the darker material better seen on Epimetheus in Epimet Profile of Janus. This image using color data obtained by the framing camera aboard NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows asteroid Vesta's southern hemisphere in color, centered on the Rheasilvia formation.
Asteroid Vesta in a 'Rainbow-Colored Palette'.
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