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Our Solar System

Our Solar System

Roger Waters :: The Wall Live :: Official Site Solar System Discovery and exploration Andreas Cellarius's illustration of the Copernican system, from the Harmonia Macrocosmica (1660) For many thousands of years, humanity, with a few notable exceptions, did not recognize the existence of the Solar System. People believed Earth to be stationary at the centre of the universe and categorically different from the divine or ethereal objects that moved through the sky. Structure and composition The orbits of the bodies in the Solar System to scale (clockwise from top left) The principal component of the Solar System is the Sun, a G2 main-sequence star that contains 99.86% of the system's known mass and dominates it gravitationally.[13] The Sun's four largest orbiting bodies, the gas giants, account for 99% of the remaining mass, with Jupiter and Saturn together comprising more than 90%. Most large objects in orbit around the Sun lie near the plane of Earth's orbit, known as the ecliptic. Distances and scales Planets of the Solar System to scale.

Origins Origins: Back to the Beginning September 29, 2004 NEIL deGRASSE TYSON (Astrophysicist): A hellish, fiery wasteland, a molten planet hostile to life, yet somehow, amazingly, this is where we got our start. How? How did the universe, our planet, how did we ourselves come to be? Right now, we're all eavesdropping on the birth pangs of the cosmos. DAVID SPERGEL (Princeton University): ...how big it is, how old it is, what's it made of, and what were the processes that made galaxies, that made us. NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: So a furious race is on to solve the ultimate mystery. ANTHONY READHEAD (California Institute of Technology): The spirit of competition is one of the things, of course, that drives scientists. Keep our fingers crossed. NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: And as our new vision of the universe emerges, strange ideas reveal themselves. STAN WOOSLEY (University of California, Santa Cruz): Stars are the ultimate alchemist. NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Those elements are the building blocks of life. Hello.

Astronomy Picture of the Day The Solar System: Space Gallery on Sea and Sky Our Solar System is a place of unimaginable beauty. Home to the Sun, eight planets, and a variety of smaller celestial objects, we have only recently been able to appreciate it fully. Thanks to the marvels of technology, robotic spacecraft have extended our view across vast distances, enabling us to see what was once hidden from our view. Join us now and examine some of the most recent images of our Solar System. Click on an image above to begin a slide show.

The Astronomy Center COSMOS Supercomputer - Home COSMOS IX arrives! On the 4th of July 2012 the brand new Altix UV2000 system from SGI arrived at DAMTP. The system, which is the largest shared-memory computer in Europe and the first SMP system in the world to be boosted by the Intel Xeon Phi co-processors later in the year, will be used to support research in cosmology, astrophysics and particle physics within the DiRAC distributed HPC Facility, funded by STFC and DBIS UK. COSMOS Mk IX features 1856 Intel Xeon E5 processor cores (SandyBridge-EP) with 14.5TB of globally shared memory. It will also eventually feature 31 Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) co-processors, providing a hybrid hierarchical SMP/MIC computing platform. See more pictures here...

Solar System, Solar System Information Our Cosmic Neighborhood From our small world we have gazed upon the cosmic ocean for thousands of years. Ancient astronomers observed points of light that appeared to move among the stars. They called these objects "planets," meaning wanderers, and named them after Roman deities—Jupiter, king of the gods; Mars, the god of war; Mercury, messenger of the gods; Venus, the goddes of love and beauty, and Saturn, father of Jupiter and god of agriculture. The stargazers also observed comets with sparkling tails, and meteors or shooting stars apparently falling from the sky. Since the invention of the telescope, three more planets have been discovered in our solar system: Uranus (1781), Neptune (1846), and, now downgraded to a dwarf planet, Pluto (1930). The four planets closest to the sun—Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—are called the terrestrial planets because they have solid rocky surfaces. Nearly every planet—and some of the moons—has an atmosphere. Moons, Rings, and Magnetospheres

Current Night Sky The Sky At A Glance There is a total lunar eclipse on April 15. The entire total phase will be visible from most of North America and western South America. (See "What's New") There is an annular solar eclipse on April 29. The annular portion of the eclipse will be visible only from Antarctica; partial phases of the eclipse will be visible in southern Australia. The Moon & Planets On April 6, the First Quarter Moon passes about 6° below Jupiter. Evening Planets (after sunset) Jupiter, WMars, SE Visible at Midnight Jupiter, WMars, SSaturn, SE Morning Planets (before sunrise) Mars, WSaturn, SWVenus, EMercury, E (early April)Neptune, E Comets There are no comets brighter than magnitude 8.0 visible in April. Meteors The Lyrid meteors peak on April 22.

breathe. | zen habits The Nine Planets Solar System Tour

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