Solar System Archives — Page 2 of 3

Uranus

The poles of most planets aim away from the plane of the solar system; like Earth’s poles, they point roughly […]

Like its larger sibling, Jupiter, Saturn is a ball of hydrogen and helium gas wrapped around a heavy core. Instead

As the Great Red Spot demonstrates, Jupiter is a world of superlatives. It is the largest planet in the solar

Scientists, too, have speculated about the possibility of life on Mars. During the 1800s, some leading astronomers thought that an

But it was only in the sixteenth century, around the time of Copernicus, that people began to see Earth as

The Venusian clouds kept astronomers from seeing the planet's surface. Without visible landmarks, they could not measure how fast Venus

January 12 NASA’s New Horizons mission is scheduled to begin scanning Pluto and its entourage of moons. It will fly

Yet many remained, and are still with us today: a small planet (and maybe more than one), icy planetesimals that

The solar system’s outer realm contains four giant planets. The largest is Jupiter, at about 11 times Earth’s diameter. Despite

The structures of the terrestrial planets are similar. Each planet has a layered structure that developed through a process called