Overview

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Overview

• Scale of the Solar System
• Stuff in the Solar System
• The Sun
• The Planets
• Moons
• The Asteroid Belt
• The Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud
• Near Earth Objects and the Potential for Impacts
• Activity

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Scale of the Solar System

• The Distance Between Solar System Objects is
  Typically measured in Astronomical Units (AU).
  
• 1AU is the Distance from Earth to the Sun (93
  million miles or 150 million kilometers).
  
• Mercury is approximately 1/3 AU from the Sun.
• Pluto is about 40 AU from the Sun.

• The Sizes of Solar System Objects are Typically
  Measured in Kilometers (km).
  
• The radius of the Sun is 6.96 x 107 km
• Earths radius is 6.38 x 105 km

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Scale of the Solar System

• Mass is typically measured in kilograms (kg).
• The Sun makes up 99.8 of the mass of the known
  Solar System. Jupiter consists of most of the
  remainder.
  
• Earths mass is 5.97 x 1024 kg. The mass of the
  Sun is 1.99 x 1030 kg.

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The Sun
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Solar Activity
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Nine PlanetsApproximately
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Earth and Mars
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Moons
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The Asteroid Belt
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The Asteroid Belt
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Asteroids

• The total mass of all the asteroids is less than
  that of the Moon.
  
• The largest asteroid by far is 1 Ceres. It is 933
  km in diameter and contains about 25 of the mass
  of all the asteroids combined.
  
• There are probably more than a million asteroids
  in the 1 km range.
  

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The Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud

• The Kuiper Belt is a disk-shaped region past the
  orbit of Neptune roughly 30 to 100 AU from the
  Sun containing many small icy bodies.
  
• The Oort Cloud is a theoretical region of the
  distant Solar System (50 to 50,000AU) that may
  contain up to a trillion comets.

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Comets
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Near Earth Objects
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Construct a Scale Model of the Solar System

• Estimate the Relative Sizes of the Planets, Based
  on the Medicine Ball Sun.
  
• Estimate the Distances Between the Planets.