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It contrasts the darker, cratered terrain of Belton Regio at lower left. Surface temp. Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most- massive known object to directly orbit the Sun.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the Solar System: Solar System – gravitationally bound system comprising the Sun and the objects that orbit it, either directly or indirectly. Of those objects that orbit the Sun directly, the largest eight are the planets (including Earth), with the remainder being ...
Transits occur when one of Pluto's moons passes between Pluto and the Sun. This occurs when one of the satellites' orbital nodes (the points where their orbits cross Pluto's ecliptic) lines up with Pluto and the Sun. This can only occur at two points in Pluto's orbit; coincidentally, these points are near Pluto's perihelion and aphelion.
Like Pluto, its orbit is highly eccentric, with a perihelion of 38.2 AU (roughly Pluto's distance from the Sun) and an aphelion of 97.6 AU, and steeply inclined to the ecliptic plane at an angle of 44°. [222] Gonggong (33.8–101.2 AU) is a dwarf planet in a comparable orbit to Eris, except that it is in a 3:10 resonance with Neptune.
Earth orbit (yellow) compared to a circle (gray) Earth orbits the Sun at an average distance of 149.60 million km (92.96 million mi), or 8.317 light-minutes, [1] in a counterclockwise direction as viewed from above the Northern Hemisphere. One complete orbit takes 365.256 days (1 sidereal year), during which time Earth has traveled 940 million ...
This solargraph exposed over the course of a year shows the Sun's paths of diurnal motion, as seen from Budapest in 2014. Sun path, sometimes also called day arc, refers to the daily and seasonal arc -like path that the Sun appears to follow across the sky as the Earth rotates and orbits the Sun. The Sun's path affects the length of daytime ...
The ecliptic or ecliptic plane is the orbital plane of Earth around the Sun. [1][2][a] From the perspective of an observer on Earth, the Sun's movement around the celestial sphere over the course of a year traces out a path along the ecliptic against the background of stars. [3] The ecliptic is an important reference plane and is the basis of ...
The heliosphere is the magnetosphere, astrosphere, and outermost atmospheric layer of the Sun. It takes the shape of a vast, tailed bubble-like region of space. In plasma physics terms, it is the cavity formed by the Sun in the surrounding interstellar medium. The "bubble" of the heliosphere is continuously "inflated" by plasma originating from ...