7.1 Overview of our planetary system  (Page 2/12)

[link] also shows that most of the material of the planets is actually concentrated in the largest one, Jupiter , which is more massive than all the rest of the planets combined. Astronomers were able to determine the masses of the planets centuries ago using Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and Newton’s law of gravity to measure the planets’ gravitational effects on one another or on moons that orbit them (see Orbits and Gravity ). Today, we make even more precise measurements of their masses by tracking their gravitational effects on the motion of spacecraft that pass near them.

Beside Earth, five other planets were known to the ancients—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—and two were discovered after the invention of the telescope: Uranus and Neptune. The eight planets all revolve in the same direction around the Sun. They orbit in approximately the same plane, like cars traveling on concentric tracks on a giant, flat racecourse. Each planet stays in its own “traffic lane,” following a nearly circular orbit about the Sun and obeying the “traffic” laws discovered by Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. Besides these planets, we have also been discovering smaller worlds beyond Neptune that are called trans-Neptunian object s or TNOs (see [link] ). The first to be found, in 1930, was Pluto , but others have been discovered during the twenty-first century. One of them, Eris , is about the same size as Pluto and has at least one moon (Pluto has five known moons.) The largest TNOs are also classed as dwarf planets, as is the largest asteroid, Ceres . (Dwarf planets will be discussed further in the chapter on Rings, Moons, and Pluto ). To date, more than 1750 of these TNOs have been discovered.

Orbits of the planets.

Each of the planets and dwarf planets also rotates (spins) about an axis running through it, and in most cases the direction of rotation is the same as the direction of revolution about the Sun. The exceptions are Venus , which rotates backward very slowly (that is, in a retrograde direction), and Uranus and Pluto , which also have strange rotations, each spinning about an axis tipped nearly on its side. We do not yet know the spin orientations of Eris, Haumea, and Makemake.

The four planets closest to the Sun (Mercury through Mars) are called the inner or terrestrial planets . Often, the Moon is also discussed as a part of this group, bringing the total of terrestrial objects to five. (We generally call Earth’s satellite “the Moon,” with a capital M, and the other satellites “moons,” with lowercase m’s.) The terrestrial planets are relatively small worlds, composed primarily of rock and metal. All of them have solid surfaces that bear the records of their geological history in the forms of craters, mountains, and volcanoes ( [link] ).