Sun Science
This medium-sized star occupies the center of our solar system.
What is the Sun?
These four planets make up the terrestrial planets.
What are Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars?
These four planets make up the Jovian planets.
What are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune?
These small, rocky objects orbit the Sun and do not develop tails.
What are asteroids?
This unit equals the average distance between Earth and the Sun, or approximately 150 million kilometers.
What is an astronomical unit?
This visible outer layer forms the shining surface of the Sun.
What is the photosphere?
These two planets are called sister planets because they are similar in size.
What are Venus and Earth?
This long-lasting cyclonic storm is Jupiter’s most recognizable atmospheric feature.
What is the Great Red Spot?
A comet develops this feature when solar energy causes its ice to vaporize and release gas and dust.
What is a tail?
This donut-shaped region beyond Neptune contains icy objects and dwarf planets.
What is the Kuiper Belt?
These are the three inner layers of the Sun.
What are the core, radiative zone, and convection zone?
The unusually high density of this innermost planet suggests that it has a large iron core.
What is Mercury?
Extreme pressure inside Jupiter changes liquid hydrogen into this unusual form of hydrogen.
What is liquid metallic hydrogen?
A rocky object that survives its trip through Earth’s atmosphere and strikes the ground receives this name.
What is a meteorite?
This spherical region of rocks and icy objects surrounds the solar system.
What is the Oort Cloud?
The Sun is located in this arm of the Milky Way galaxy.
What is the Orion arm?
This gas makes up approximately 97 percent of Venus’s atmosphere and contributes to its runaway greenhouse effect.
What is carbon dioxide?
This planet appears to rotate on its side because its axis lies nearly parallel to the plane of its orbit.
What is Uranus?
This dwarf planet is located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
What is Ceres?
Comets that complete an orbit in approximately 200 years generally originate in this region.
What is the Kuiper Belt?
Our region of the Milky Way takes approximately this long to complete one orbit around the galaxy.
What is 230 million years?
This enormous Martian canyon system probably formed when material slipped along large faults in the crust.
What is Valles Marineris
The retrograde motion of this large moon suggests that Neptune captured it with gravity.
What is Triton?
This famous comet can be seen from Earth approximately every 75 to 79 years and will return in 2061.
What is Halley’s Comet?
This distant region may extend as far as 100,000 astronomical units from the Sun.
What is the Oort Cloud?