What are the 3 compositions of the solar system?
What are the 3 compositions of the solar system?
The Solar System. Our solar system consists of an average star we call the Sun, the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. It includes: the satellites of the planets; numerous comets, asteroids, and meteoroids; and the interplanetary medium.
What are comets mostly made of?
Comets are frozen leftovers from the formation of the solar system composed of dust, rock, and ices. They range from a few miles to tens of miles wide, but as they orbit closer to the Sun, they heat up and spew gases and dust into a glowing head that can be larger than a planet.
What are Jovian planets?
Vocabulary. These are terms students may encounter while doing further research on the planets in the solar system: Jovian planets: The outer planets of our solar system: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
Why do the planets have different compositions?
The reason for different composition of planets has to do with how the solar system formed. In the inner solar system, it was too hot for these compounds to solify; only rocks and metals can solidify at these temperatures. Hence, only small planetessimals formed in the inner solar system.
What is the composition of planet Mercury?
Mercury is also smaller—albeit more massive—than the largest natural satellites in the Solar System, Ganymede and Titan. Mercury consists of approximately 70% metallic and 30% silicate material.
What are asteroids composition?
Asteroids are made of rock, metals and other elements. Some even contain water, astronomers say. Asteroids that are mostly stone sometimes are more like loose piles of rubble. Asteroids that are mostly iron are more, well, rock-solid.
What are the 4 components of a comet?
A comet is made up of four visible parts: the nucleus, the coma, the ion tail, and the dust tail. The nucleus is a solid body typically a few kilometres in diameter and made up of a mixture of volatile ices (predominantly water ice) and silicate and organic dust particles.
What are Jovian and terrestrial planets?
Explanation: Terrestrial Planets: Coming from the Latin word “terra”, meaning “land,” the terrestrial planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Jovian planets are larger, further from the sun, rotate faster, have more moons, have more rings, are less dense overall and have denser cores than terrestrial planets.
Is Charon still a moon?
At half the size of Pluto, Charon is the largest of Pluto’s moons and the largest known satellite relative to its parent body.
What is the chemical composition of the planets in our Solar System?
The two largest planets, Jupiter and Saturn, have nearly the same chemical makeup as the Sun; they are composed primarily of the two elements hydrogen and helium, with 75% of their mass being hydrogen and 25% helium.
Can we use geophysical data to understand planetary compositions?
The geophysical data, although suggestive, are not decisive in answering this question. This situation serves to remind us just how much information is needed to understand planetary bodies. One of the principal geochemical constraints on models of planetary compositions comes from the oxygen isotopic data [8-111.
How are the elements partitioned among the planets?
The meteoritic and lunar abundance data suggest that the elements are partitioned among these bodies in groups, based on differences in volatil- ity, and in siderophile and chalcophile properties [13]. These differences in elemental properties appear to be fundamental to an understanding of bulk planetary compositions.
What are the geochemical constraints on planetary compositions?
One of the principal geochemical constraints on models of planetary compositions comes from the oxygen isotopic data [8-111. This was perhaps first realized from the analysis of oxygen isotopes on the Moon, where
