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The four giant planets of the Solar System: ( top) Jupiter and Saturn ( gas giants) ( bottom) Uranus and Neptune ( ice giants) Shown in order from the Sun and in true color. Sizes are not to scale. A giant planet, sometimes referred to as a jovian planet ( Jove being another name for the Roman god Jupiter ), is a diverse type of planet much ...
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest in the Solar System.A gas giant, Jupiter's mass is more than two and a half times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined and slightly less than one one-thousandth the mass of the Sun. Jupiter orbits the Sun at a distance of 5.20 AU (778.5 Gm) with an orbital period of 11.86 years.
Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun. It is a gaseous cyan -coloured ice giant. Most of the planet is made of water, ammonia, and methane in a supercritical phase of matter, astronomy calls "ice" or volatiles. The planet's atmosphere has a complex layered cloud structure and has the lowest minimum temperature of 49 K (−224 °C; −371 ...
In 1915, he published his Memoir of a Trans-Neptunian Planet, in which he concluded that Planet X had a mass roughly seven times that of Earth—about half that of Neptune —and a mean distance from the Sun of 43 AU. He assumed Planet X would be a large, low-density object with a high albedo, like the giant planets.
An ice giant is a giant planet composed mainly of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, such as oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur. There are two ice giants in the Solar System: Uranus and Neptune . In astrophysics and planetary science the term "ice" refers to volatile chemical compounds with freezing points above about 100 K, such as ...
2060 Chiron. 2060 Chiron is a ringed small Solar System body in the outer Solar System, orbiting the Sun between Saturn and Uranus. Discovered in 1977 by Charles Kowal, it was the first-identified member of a new class of objects now known as centaurs —bodies orbiting between the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt.
One of the explanations for this is the gravitational lensing of a red giant by a star with a mass between 0.02 and 3.6 times that of the Sun, which suggested that the star is likely orbited by a planet. This possible exoplanet would have a mass 6.34 times that of Jupiter. If finally confirmed, it would be the first ever found extragalactic ...
It is still around 25 times more luminous than the Sun. The closest large neighbouring star to Sirius is Procyon, 1.61 parsecs (5.24 ly) away. The Voyager 2 spacecraft, launched in 1977 to study the four giant planets in the Solar System, is expected to pass within 4.3 light-years (1.3 pc) of Sirius in approximately 296,000 years.