Solar System Facts

Our solar system includes the Sun and all orbiting objects within its gravitational pull . This includes things such as planets , comets , asteroids , meteorites and moons. Our solar system formed around 4.6 billion years ago.

There are eight planets in our solar system. The closest planets to the Sun are Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, while the furthest planets from the Sun are Jupiter , Saturn , Uranus and Neptune.

There is an asteroid belt which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It features a large number of irregular shaped asteroids.

For thousands of years, humans were unaware of the solar system surrounding us and believed that Earth was at the centre of the Universe.

Astronomers such as Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei , Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton helped develop a new model that explained the movement of the planets with the Sun at the centre of our solar system.