NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft captured this high-resolution enhanced color view of Pluto on July 14, 2015. This is a sparsely occupied ring of icy bodies, almost all smaller than the most popular Kuiper Belt Object – dwarf planet Pluto. The solar system also includes the Kuiper Belt that lies past Neptune's orbit. Our solar system extends much farther than the eight planets that orbit the Sun. Our planetary system is named the "solar system" because our Sun is named Sol, after the Latin word for Sun, "solis," and anything related to the Sun we call "solar." Size and Distance There are many planetary systems like ours in the universe, with planets orbiting a host star.
It seems that we live in a universe packed with planets – a web of countless stars accompanied by families of objects, perhaps some with life of their own. While our planet is in some ways a mere speck in the vast cosmos, we have a lot of company out there. Most of the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy are thought to have planets of their own, and the Milky Way is but one of perhaps 100 billion galaxies in the universe. So far, we have discovered thousands of planetary systems orbiting other stars in the Milky Way, with more planets being found. Our solar system consists of our star, the Sun, and everything bound to it by gravity – the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune dwarf planets such as Pluto dozens of moons and millions of asteroids, comets, and meteoroids.īeyond our own solar system, there are more planets than stars in the night sky. The planetary system we call home is located in an outer spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy.