Planet Earth

Earth, our home, is the third planet from the sun. It's the only planet known to have an
atmosphere containing free oxygen, oceans of water on its surface and, of course, life.

Earth is the fifth largest of the planets in the solar system. It's smaller than the four gas
giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — but larger than the three other rocky
planets, Mercury, Mars and Venus.
Earth has a diameter of roughly 8,000 miles (13,000 kilometers) and is round because
gravity pulls matter into a ball. But, it's not perfectly round. Earth is really an "oblate
spheroid," because its spin causes it to be squashed at its poles and swollen at the
equator.

Water covers roughly 71 percent of Earth's surface, and most of that is in the oceans.
About a fifth of Earth's atmosphere consists of oxygen, produced by plants. While
scientists have been studying our planet for centuries, much has been learned in recent
decades by studying pictures of Earth from space.

What is Space?
From the perspective of an Earthling, outer space is a zone that occurs about 100
kilometers (60 miles) above the planet, where there is no appreciable air to breathe or
to scatter light. In that area, blue gives way to black because oxygen molecules are not
in enough abundance to make the sky blue.

Further, space is a vacuum, meaning that sound cannot carry because molecules are
not close enough together to transmit sound between them. That's not to say that space
is empty, however. Gas, dust and other bits of matter float around "emptier" areas of the
universe, while more crowded regions can host planets, stars and galaxies.

No one knows exactly how big space is. The difficulty arises because of what we can
see in our detectors. We measure long distances in space in "light-years," representing
the distance it takes for light to travel in a year (roughly 5.8 trillion miles, or 9.3 trillion
kilometers).

From light that is visible in our telescopes, we have charted galaxies reaching almost as
far back as the Big Bang, which is thought to have started our universe 13.7 billion
years ago. This means we can "see" into space at a distance of almost 13.7 billion light-
years. However, astronomers are not sure if our universe is the only universe that
exists. This means that space could be a lot bigger than it appears to us.
The Solar System[a] is the gravitationally bound system of the Sun and the objects that orbit it, either
directly or indirectly.[b] Of the objects that orbit the Sun directly, the largest are the eight
planets,[c] with the remainder being smaller objects, the dwarf planets and small Solar System
bodies. Of the objects that orbit the Sun indirectly—the moons—two are larger than the smallest
planet, Mercury.[d]
The Solar System formed 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of a giant
interstellar molecular cloud. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun, with the majority of
the remaining mass contained in Jupiter. The four smaller inner planets,
Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, are terrestrial planets, being primarily composed of rock and metal.
The four outer planets are giant planets, being substantially more massive than the terrestrials. The
two largest, Jupiter and Saturn, are gas giants, being composed mainly of hydrogen and helium; the
two outermost planets, Uranus and Neptune, are ice giants, being composed mostly of substances
with relatively high melting points compared with hydrogen and helium, called volatiles, such as
water, ammonia and methane. All eight planets have almost circular orbits that lie within a nearly flat
disc called the ecliptic.
The Solar System also contains smaller objects.[e] The asteroid belt, which lies between the orbits of
Mars and Jupiter, mostly contains objects composed, like the terrestrial planets, of rock and metal.
Beyond Neptune's orbit lie the Kuiper belt and scattered disc, which are populations of trans-
Neptunian objects composed mostly of ices, and beyond them a newly discovered population
of sednoids. Within these populations, some objects large enough to have rounded under their own
gravity, though there is considerable debate as to how many they will prove to be.[9][10] Such objects
are categorized as dwarf planets. Identified or accepted dwarf planets include the
asteroid Ceres and the trans-Neptunian objects Pluto and Eris.[e] In addition to these two regions,
various other small-body populations, including comets, centaurs and interplanetary dust clouds,
freely travel between regions. Six of the planets, the six largest possible dwarf planets, and many of
the smaller bodies are orbited by natural satellites,[f] usually termed "moons" after the Moon. Each of
the outer planets is encircled by planetary rings of dust and other small objects.
The solar wind, a stream of charged particles flowing outwards from the Sun, creates a bubble-like
region in the interstellar medium known as the heliosphere. The heliopause is the point at which
pressure from the solar wind is equal to the opposing pressure of the interstellar medium; it extends
out to the edge of the scattered disc. The Oort cloud, which is thought to be the source for long-
period comets, may also exist at a distance roughly a thousand times further than the heliosphere.
The Solar System is located in the Orion Arm, 26,000 light-years from the center of the Milky
Way galaxy.