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The first eon in Earth's history, the Hadean, begins with the Earth's formation and is followed by the Archean eon at 3.8 Ga. [2]: 145 The oldest rocks found on Earth date to about 4.0 Ga, and the oldest detrital zircon crystals in rocks to about 4.4 Ga, [34] [35] [36] soon after the formation of the Earth's crust and the Earth
Another example is Earth's axial tilt, which, due to friction raised within Earth's mantle by tidal interactions with the Moon , is incomputable from some point between 1.5 and 4.5 billion years from now. [104] The outer planets' orbits are chaotic over longer timescales, with a Lyapunov time in the range of 2–230 million years. [105]
According to evidence from radiometric dating and other sources, Earth formed about 4.54 billion years ago. [7] [8] [9] The current dominant theory of planet formation suggests that planets such as Earth form in about 50 to 100 million years but more recently proposed alternative processes and timescales have stimulated ongoing debate in the planetary science community. [10]
French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes was the first to propose a model for the origin of the Solar System in his book The World, written from 1629 to 1633.. In his view, the universe was filled with vortices of swirling particles, and both the Sun and planets had condensed from a large vortex that had contracted, which he thought could explain the circular motion of the plane
c. 500 – Indian mathematician-astronomer Aryabhata accurately computes the solar and lunar eclipses, and the length of Earth's revolution around the Sun. c. 500 – Aryabhata discovers the oblique motion of the apsidial precession of the Sun and notes that it is changing with respect to the motion of stars and Earth.
Thus, the Sun occupies 0.00001% (1 part in 10 7) of the volume of a sphere with a radius the size of Earth's orbit, whereas Earth's volume is roughly 1 millionth (10 −6) that of the Sun. Jupiter, the largest planet, is 5.2 AU from the Sun and has a radius of 71,000 km (0.00047 AU; 44,000 mi), whereas the most distant planet, Neptune, is 30 AU ...
The ancient Hebrews, like all the ancient peoples of the Near East, believed the sky was a solid dome with the Sun, Moon, planets and stars embedded in it. [4] In biblical cosmology, the firmament is the vast solid dome created by God during his creation of the world to divide the primal sea into upper and lower portions so that the dry land could appear.
Telescopic observations resulted in the discovery of moons and rings around planets, and new planets, comets and the asteroids; the recognition of planets as other worlds, of Earth as another planet, and stars as other suns; the identification of the Solar System as an entity in itself, and the determination of the distances to some nearby stars.