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 …

Our planetary system is called “the solar system” because we use the word “solar” to describe things related to our star, after the Latin word for Sun, "solis."

Oct 21, 2025 · 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.

Most of this ancient space rubble can be found orbiting our Sun between Mars and Jupiter within the main asteroid belt. Asteroids range in size from Vesta – the largest at about 329 miles (530 …

If you know how big you want the largest size (LS) in the model to be, then the scale is the ratio of the true largest size (TLS, e.g., the distance from the Sun to Pluto) to the size in the model (LS):

The observations suggest this unusual object had been wandering through the Milky Way, unattached to any star system, for hundreds of millions of years before its chance encounter with our star system.

It was slightly brighter than the north star Polaris but again spread over a much larger area than a point-like star. At aphelion in 1948, Halley was 35.25 AU (3.28 billion miles or 5.27 billion kilometers) from …

Sep 3, 2025 · Jupiter Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun, and the largest in the solar system, by far — more than twice as massive as the other planets combined.

The inner, main region of the Kuiper Belt ends around 50 AU from the Sun. Overlapping the outer edge of the main part of the Kuiper Belt is a second region called the scattered disk, which continues …

Borrelly follows an elliptical orbit around the Sun, looping from inside the orbit of Mars to outside the orbit of Jupiter and back again. It is a "Jupiter-family comet," with an orbital period of fewer than 20 years …