A Bit about out solar system

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A solar system is a star and all of the objects that travel around it—planets, moons, asteroids, comets and meteoroids. Most stars host their own planets, so there are likely tens of billions of other solar systems in the Milky Way galaxy alone. Solar systems can also have more than one star. These are called binary star systems if there are two stars, or multi-star systems if there are three or more stars.

The solar system we call home is located in an outer spiral arm of the vast Milky Way galaxy. It consists of the Sun (our star) and everything that orbits around it. This includes the eight planets and their natural satellites (such as our moon), dwarf planets and their satellites, as well as asteroids, comets and countless particles of smaller debris.

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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.




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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