Earth's Orbit: Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Mercury Mars Venus
Earth's Orbit: Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Mercury Mars Venus
Earth's Orbit: Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Mercury Mars Venus
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 oceans.
About a fifth of Earth's atmosphere consists of oxygen, produced by plants. While
scientists have been studying our planet for centuries, much has been learned in recent
decades by studying pictures of Earth from space.
Earth's orbit
While Earth orbits the sun, the planet is simultaneously spinning on an imaginary line
called an axis that runs from the North Pole to the South Pole. It takes Earth 23.934
hours to complete a rotation on its axis and 365.26 days to complete an orbit around the
sun.
Earth's axis of rotation is tilted in relation to the ecliptic plane, an imaginary surface
through the planet's orbit around the sun. This means the Northern and Southern
hemispheres will sometimes point toward or away from the sun depending on the time
of year, and this changes the amount of light the hemispheres receive, resulting in
the seasons.
Earth's orbit is not a perfect circle, but rather an oval-shaped ellipse, similar to the orbits
of all the other planets. Our planet is a bit closer to the sun in early January and farther
away in July, although this variation has a much smaller effect than the heating and
cooling caused by the tilt of Earth's axis. Earth happens to lie within the so-called
"Goldilocks zone" around the sun, where temperatures are just right to maintain liquid
water on our planet's surface.