The Discovery and Exploration of the Solar System

Just like in the title,this time I'm gonna tell you about the Discovery and also the Exploration of the Solar System.For many thousands of years, humanity, with a few notable exceptions, did not recognize the existence of the Solar System. People believed the Earth to be stationary at the centre of the universe(They believe the sun and other planets are rotating around the earth).Although Aristarchus of Samos theorized that the earth is actually rotating the sun,Nicolaus Copernicus was the first to develop a mathematically predictive the heliocentric system.His 17th-century successors, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton, developed an understanding of physics that led to the gradual acceptance of the idea that the Earth moves around the Sun and that the planets are governed by the same physical laws that governed the Earth. Additionally, the invention of the telescope led to the discovery of further planets and moons. In more recent times, improvements in the telescope and the use of unmanned spacecraft have enabled the investigation of geological phenomena, such as mountains and craters, and seasonal meteorological phenomena, such as clouds, dust storms, and ice caps on the other planets.

Introduction to the Solar System

The Solar System^[a] comprises the Sun and its planetary system of eight planets, their moons, and other non-stellar objects.^[b][c] It formed 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of a giant molecular cloud. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun, with most of the remaining mass contained in Jupiter. The four smaller inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, also called the terrestrial planets, are primarily composed of rock and metal. The four outer planets, called the gas giants, are substantially more massive than the terrestrials. The two largest, Jupiter and Saturn, are composed mainly of hydrogen and helium; the two outermost planets, Uranus and Neptune, are composed largely of substances with relatively high melting points (compared with hydrogen and helium), called ices, such as water, ammonia and methane, and are often referred to separately as "ice giants".