Space Science

The planetary system we call home is located in an outer spiral arm of the Milky
Way galaxy.
Our solar system consists of our star, the Sun, and everything bound to it by gravity
— the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune,
dwarf planets such as Pluto, dozens of moons and millions of asteroids, comets and
meteoroids.
Beyond our own solar system, there are more planets than stars in night sky. So far,
we have discovered thousands of planetary systems orbiting other stars in the Milky
Way, with more planets being found all the time. Most of the hundreds of billions of
stars in our galaxy are thought to have planets of their own, and the Milky Way is but
one of perhaps 100 billion galaxies in the universe.
While our planet is in some ways a mere speck in the vast cosmos, we have a lot of
company out there. It seems that we live in a universe packed with planets — a web
of countless stars accompanied by families of objects, perhaps some with life of their
own.
Size and Distance

Our solar system extends much farther than the eight planets that orbit the Sun. The
solar system also includes the Kuiper Belt that lies past Neptune's orbit. This is a
sparsely occupied ring of icy bodies, almost all smaller than the most popular Kuiper
Belt Object, dwarf planet Pluto.
Pluto nearly fills the frame in this image from the Long Range Reconnaissance
Imager (LORRI) aboard NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, taken on July 13, 2015,
when the spacecraft was 476,000 miles (768,000 kilometers) from the surface.
Image Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI
And beyond the fringes of the Kuiper belt is the Oort Cloud. This giant spherical shell
surrounds our solar system. It has never been directly observed, but its existence is
predicted based on mathematical models and observations of comets that likely
originate there.
The Oort Cloud is made of icy pieces of space debris the sizes of mountains and
sometimes larger, orbiting our Sun as far as 1.6 light years away. This shell of
material is thick, extending from 5,000 astronomical units to 100,000 astronomical
units. One astronomical unit (or AU) is the distance from the Sun to Earth, or about
93 million miles (150 million kilometers). The Oort Cloud is the boundary of the Sun's
gravitational influence, where orbiting objects can turn around and return closer to
our Sun.
The Sun's heliosphere doesn't extend quite as far. The heliosphere is the bubble
created by the solar wind—a stream of electrically charged gas blowing outward
from the Sun in all directions. The boundary where the solar wind is abruptly slowed
by pressure from interstellar gases is called the termination shock. This edge occurs
between 80-100 astronomical units.
Two NASA spacecraft, launched in 1977, have crossed the termination shock:
Voyager 1 in 2004 and Voyager 2 in 2007. But it will be many thousands of years
before the two Voyagers exit the Oort Cloud.
Formation
Our solar system formed about 4.5 billion years ago from a dense cloud of
interstellar gas and dust. The cloud collapsed, possibly due to the shockwave of a
nearby exploding star, called a supernova. When this dust cloud collapsed, it formed
a solar nebula—a spinning, swirling disk of material.
At the center, gravity pulled more and more material in. Eventually the pressure in
the core was so great that hydrogen atoms began to combine and form helium,
releasing a tremendous amount of energy. With that, our Sun was born, and it
eventually amassed more than 99 percent of the available matter.
Matter farther out in the disk was also clumping together. These clumps smashed
into one another, forming larger and larger objects. Some of them grew big enough
for their gravity to shape them into spheres, becoming planets, dwarf planets and
large moons. In other cases, planets did not form: the asteroid belt is made of bits
and pieces of the early solar system that could never quite come together into a
planet. Other smaller leftover pieces became asteroids, comets, meteoroids, and
small, irregular moons.

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The planetary system we call home is located in an outer spiral arm of the Milky

Size and Distance

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