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The Sun is a 4.5 billion-year-old yellow dwarf star – a hot glowing ball of hydrogen and helium – at the center of our solar system. It’s about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from Earth and it’s our solar system’s only star.
Sun and Five Largest Planets, sizes, but not distances, to scale. Like all stars, our sun is made mostly of hydrogen (a little over 73%) and some helium (a little under 25%), with just a few percent of heavier elements, like lithium, calcium, oxygen, and iron.
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.
It must orbit a star (in our cosmic neighborhood, the Sun). It must be big enough to have enough gravity to force it into a spherical shape. It must be big enough that its gravity cleared away any other objects of a similar size near its orbit around the Sun.
Oct 24, 2024 · The Sun is the star at the heart of our solar system. Its gravity holds the solar system together, keeping everything – from the biggest planets to the smallest bits of debris – in its orbit.
Uranus orbits our Sun, a star, and is the seventh planet from the Sun at a distance of about 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers).
Neptune orbits our Sun, a star, and is the eighth planet from the Sun at a distance of about 2.8 billion miles (4.5 billion kilometers).
In fact, Jupiter has the same ingredients as a star, but it did not grow massive enough to ignite. About 4 billion years ago, Jupiter settled into its current position in the outer solar system, where it is the fifth planet from the Sun.
The ancients, therefore, gave it great importance in their cultures, even thinking it was two objects: a morning star and an evening star. That’s where the trick of perspective comes in. Because Venus’ orbit is closer to the Sun than ours, the two of them – from our viewpoint – never stray far from each other.
This unique tilt makes Uranus appear to spin sideways, orbiting the Sun like a rolling ball. The first planet found with the aid of a telescope, Uranus was discovered in 1781 by astronomer William Herschel, although he originally thought it was either a comet or a star.
