24 Solar System Facts For Kids

1. Our Solar System is located about 27,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way galaxy in the Orion-Cygnus Arm.
2. Our Solar System formed about 4.6 billion years ago from a giant interstellar molecular cloud that had a gravitational collapse.
3. Our Solar System contains one star (the Sun), eight planets, 216 natural satellites (moons) and countless other objects.
4. The Sun in our Solar System is a G2-type main-sequence star.
5. The Sun accounts for 99.86% of all the mass in our Solar System.
6. The eight planets in our Solar System, in order of distance to the Sun are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
7. The planets that make up the inner solar system, also known as the inner planets, are Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.
8. All four of the inner planets are rocky planets (terrestrial planets).
9. The planets that make up the outer solar system, also known as the outer planets, are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
10. Two outer planets are gas giants (Jupiter and Saturn) and the other two are ice giants (Uranus and Neptune).
11. In between the inner solar system (inner planets) and the outer solar system (outer planets) is the Asteroid Belt.
12. There are an estimated 1.1 and 1.9 million asteroids in the Asteroid Belt with a diameter of at least 0.6 miles.
13. The largest object in the Asteroid Belt is Ceres with a diameter of 590.3 miles and is technically a dwarf planet.
14. There are an estimated 216 moons orbiting the eight planets in our Solar System, only six of the eight planets have one or more moons. The only two planets that don’t have any moons are Mercury and Venus.
15. Earth has one moon, Mars are two moons, Jupiter has 80 moons, Saturn has 83 moons, Uranus has 27 moons and Neptune has 14 moons.
16. The largest moon in our Solar System is Ganymede with a diameter of 3,273 miles and orbits Jupiter.
17. Through our Solar System are millions and with some estimates trillions of comets with various orbits.
18. To date, there are more than 4,500 known and documented comets, with the most famous comet being Halley’s Comet.
19. The Kuiper Belt is a massive ring of ice debris that encircles our Solar System and is between 2.8 to 4.6 billion miles from the Sun.
20. The largest known object in the Kuiper Belt is Pluto, a dwarf planet with a diameter of 1,476.8 miles.
21. Pluto use to be the ninth planet in our Solar System, until in 2006 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) redefined what constituted a planet and demoted Pluto to a dwarf planet.
22. The heliosphere is a stellar-wind bubble that is a region around our Solar System where solar winds collide with interstellar medium and space.
23. The Oort Cloud is a ring of icy planetesimals that encircle our entire Solar System.
24. It’s estimated the Oort Cloud extended out between 0.03 to 3.2 light-years from the Sun and contains trillions of objects.

Solar System Pictures

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the below images will be helpful for your research on our Solar System. Below are twelve pictures of celestial objects in our Solar System. These pictures should help you better understand our Solar System, the only one known to harbor life in the universe.

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