In Depth The Sun is a 4.5 billion-year-old yellow dwarf star – a hot glowing ball of hydrogen and helium – at the center of our solar system. It’s about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from Earth and it’s our solar system’s only star. Without the Sun’s energy, life as we know it could not exist on our home planet.

Understanding the Context

The Sun is the star at the heart of our solar system. Its gravity holds the solar system together, keeping everything – from the biggest planets to the smallest bits of debris – in its orbit. The planetary system we call home is located in an outer spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. 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.

Key Insights

Beyond our own solar system, there ... Size and Distance The Kuiper Belt is one of the largest structures in our solar system – others being the Oort Cloud, the heliosphere, and the magnetosphere of Jupiter. Its overall shape is like a puffed-up disk or donut. Its inner edge begins at the orbit of Neptune, at about 30 AU from the Sun. (1 AU, or astronomical unit, is the distance from Earth to the Sun.) The inner, main region of ...

Final Thoughts

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun, and the seventh largest. It’s the only planet we know of inhabited entirely by robots. Titan’s atmospheric nitrogen ratio suggests the moon’s building blocks formed early in the solar system's history, in the same cold disk of gas and dust that formed the Sun (called the protosolar nebula), rather than forming in the warmer disk of material that Saturn later formed from (called the Saturn sub-nebula). Surface Halley was last seen in Earth's skies in 1986 and was met in space by an international fleet of spacecraft. It will return in 2061 on its regular 76-year journey around the Sun. The History of Halley's Comet Until the time of English astronomer Edmond Halley (1656-1742), comets were believed to make only one pass through the solar system.

Formation Jupiter’s large Galilean moons – Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto – likely formed out of leftover material after Jupiter condensed from the initial cloud of gas and dust surrounding the sun, early in the history of the solar system.