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Celestia is a real-time 3D astronomy software program that was created in 2001 by Chris Laurel. The program allows users to virtually travel through the universe and explore celestial objects that have been catalogued. Celestia also doubles as a planetarium, but the user is not restricted to the Earth's surface, like in other planetarium ...
Orrery. A small orrery showing Earth and the inner planets. An orrery is a mechanical model of the Solar System that illustrates or predicts the relative positions and motions of the planets and moons, usually according to the heliocentric model. It may also represent the relative sizes of these bodies; however, since accurate scaling is often ...
Ceres(minor-planet designation: 1 Ceres) is a dwarf planetin the middle main asteroid beltbetween the orbits of Marsand Jupiter. It was the first known asteroid, discovered on 1 January 1801 by Giuseppe Piazziat Palermo Astronomical Observatoryin Sicily, and announced as a new planet.
The orbits of the planets are open to long-term variations. Modeling the Solar System is a case of the n-body problem of physics, which is generally unsolvable except by numerical simulation. Because of the chaotic behavior embedded in the mathematics, long-term predictions can only be statistical, rather than certain.
The orbits of Solar System planets are nearly circular. Compared to many other systems, they have smaller orbital eccentricity. [69] Although there are attempts to explain it partly with a bias in the radial-velocity detection method and partly with long interactions of a quite high number of planets, the exact causes remain undetermined. [69] [73]
A numerical model of the Solar System is a set of mathematical equations, which, when solved, give the approximate positions of the planets as a function of time. Attempts to create such a model established the more general field of celestial mechanics. The results of this simulation can be compared with past measurements to check for accuracy ...
Extraterrestrial sky. A historic extraterrestrial sky— Earthrise, the Earth viewed from the Moon. Taken by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders while in lunar orbit, December 24, 1968. In astronomy, an extraterrestrial sky is a view of outer space from the surface of an astronomical body other than Earth .
Proxima Centauri b is the closest exoplanet to Earth, [20] at a distance of about 4.2 ly (1.3 parsecs). [5] It orbits Proxima Centauri every 11.186 Earth days at a distance of about 0.049 AU, [1] over 20 times closer to Proxima Centauri than Earth is to the Sun. [21] As of 2021, it is unclear whether it has an eccentricity [e] [24] but Proxima Centauri b is unlikely to have any obliquity. [25]