The Solar System

The Solar System contains many thousands of bodies. Its exact computation is practically impossible.

However, the situation is not so bad. One of the bodies (the Sun) dominates over all the others, since its mass is much larger (Jupiter, the second body in mass, is about 1000 times less massive as the Sun).

We can thus compute the movements of the Solar System by forgetting most of the bodies expect those we are interested in, and the two largest ones (the Sun and Jupiter).

In this way, we can divide the Solar System into two parts:

• The Inner Solar System: the planets Mercury, Venus, the Earth and Mars, together with one satellite (the Moon) and the asteroids (represented in our example by one of the near-Earth objects, asteroid Apollo). We add Jupiter to our computations, but don't show it. The satellites of Mars (Deimos and Phobos) need not be included, as they are very small and their effect on the remaining bodies is negligible.

• The Outer Solar System (the planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto).

Last modified 21/12/99 by Juan de Lara ( Juan.Lara@ii.uam.es, http://www.ii.uam.es/~jlara) need help for using this courses?.