Order of planets from Earth
Order of the Planets: An astronomy primer
The order of the planets, starting at the sun and moving outwards is as follows:
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto
If you want to remember the Order of Planets, it is easy to remember a rhyme such as "My Very Easy Method Just Simply Uses Nine Planets" This gives you the initial letters of the nine planets of the solar system in order.
There is now evidence that either Pluto is too small to be a planet or that there are hundreds of other small planets the same size as Pluto further out in space so the list of planets could get longer. In fact we now know there are hundreds or indeed thousands of planets around other stars, but thankfully nobody asks us to remember the names of planets outside our solar system.
The earth is orbiting around the sun at about 90 miles per second. Mercury, the first planet is a tiny ball.
Distance from the Sun of Each of the Planets of our solar system:
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Mercury - 35,983,610 million miles
- Venus - 67,232,360 million miles
- Earth - 92,957,100 million miles
- Mars - 141,635,300 million miles
- Jupiter - 483,632,000 million miles
- Saturn - 888,188,000 million miles
- Uranus - 1,783,950,000 million miles
- Neptune - 2,798,842,000 million miles
- Pluto - 3,674,491,000 million miles
Size of the Planets
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Mercury - 3,045 miles in Diameter
- Venus - 7,518 miles in Diameter
- Earth - 7,953 miles in Diameter
- Mars - 4,225 miles in Diameter
- Jupiter - 88,856 miles in Diameter
- Saturn - 77,671 miles in Diameter
- Uranus - 31,752 miles in Diameter
- Neptune - 30,757 miles in Diameter
- Pluto - 1,429 miles in Diameter
Is Pluto a Planet?
In the Summer of 2006 The The International Astronomical Union (IAU) finally settled the question of whether Pluto, which was first spotted in 1930 is really a planet or just an asteroid.
Pluto is very small and there are bigger objects (such as 2003 UB313 - nicknamed Xena - discovered by by Professor Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology) out in our solar system.
The IAU ruled that Pluto is not a planet because it has not 'cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.' which means it has not got enough gravity to attract all the asteroids in the area to itself.
Can we see the planets from Earth?
Yes we can see the planets. The two closest planets, Venus and Mars can be often easily seen with the naked eye. For the others a telescope is needed.
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MARS image by NASA and the
European Space Agency taken from the Hubble Telescope |
A good piece of equipment is a book called "Looking at the Planets: A Book About the Solar System" by Melvin Berger (beautifully illustrated by Damon Hertig) which includes a Glow in the Dark Planet Mobile.
Are there any other planets?
Yes. Scientists first discovered a planet in a different solar
system back in 1996 and since then more have been discovere. They are currently
inding them at the rate of about about 25 planets a year and have so far
found more than more than 200 planets in other Solar Systems. This means
that there are probably millions upon billions of planets in the universe
and so the chance that there is life out there is also much higher than
we believed before 1996..