The Sun’s solar system composes and the planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. It comprises planetary satellites, multiple comets, meteoroids, asteroids, and the interplanetary medium. The Sun is the solar system’s most effective form of electromagnetic energy (in the form of light and heat). The solar system circles the galaxy’s core, the 200-billion-star spiral disk called the Milky Way. The Milky Way has two small galaxies – the Small Magellanic Cloud and the Large Magellanic Cloud – orbiting it, inherently visible from the southern hemisphere (Murray, 1999). The Andromeda Galaxy, which is spiral like the Milky Way, is the nearest large galaxy with four times as big and 2 million light-years distant.
The planets, satellites, and asteroids rotate in the same direction around the Sun, in circular orbits. Planets orbit the Sun in the same axis called the ecliptic. Pluto orbits are the most inclined degrees and are the most elliptical of all planets hence nearer to the Sun. The solar system seems to be nearly empty by volume. This vacuum, far from being empty, contains the interplanetary medium with different energy sources and at two components of materials: interplanetary dust and interplanetary gas (Morbidelli et al., 2005). The Interplanetary gas contains charged particles called the solar wind, mainly protons and electrons from the Earth. The solar wind speeds about 250 miles per second around the Earth’s orbit. The solar wind meets the interstellar medium at the heliopause. The solar magnetic force is projected externally into the interplanetary space. The solar magnetic field is the dominant magnetic field in the solar system’s interplanetary regions and in the immediate environment of planets having their magnetic fields.
References List
Murray, C.D. and Dermott, S.F., 1999. Solar system dynamics. Cambridge university press.
Morbidelli, A., Levison, H.F., Tsiganis, K. and Gomes, R., 2005. Chaotic capture of Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids in the early Solar System. Nature, 435(7041), pp.462-465.