Ah! Home sweet home. Tucked away in a corner spiral of the Milky Way is the place we call home. I am talking about the planet which is called home by 8 billion people - Earth.
The Solar system is the family of the Sun. We, living on Earth, are also a part of this family. Well, where exactly is our Solar System?
The Solar System consists of many celestial bodies. The major ones are The Sun, Eight Planets, Asteroids, Meteorites, Comets, Dwarf Planets. The planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars are known as rocky planets, other planets of the solar system are known as gas giants since they're made up of nothing but gas and particles. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune are all gas giants. In between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter is a great belt of asteroids, big and small. Ceres, a dwarf planet which also lies in the asteroid belt.
Now, the solar system currently has 5 dwarf planets, namely Pluto, Ceres, Eris, Makemake and Haumea. There are a lot of Comets in our Solar System. The first comet we observed returning was Halley’s Comet. Since then we know that Comets also have a particular orbit.
Just like our Solar System, there are a lot of stars scattered everywhere in the universe and each of them have their own planetary system. The 2nd nearest star to earth is Proxima Centauri, located in the Centaurus constellation. It also has a planet ‘Proxima b’. It lies in the habitable zone. There are millions of possibilities for life to exist in this universe. We’ve already discovered many of them.
We hope you learned something new. For more facts and better experience make sure to keep checking our blog.
-by Akshit Kumar Sutrakar