Sun

Mercury

Venus

Earth

Moon

Mars

Jupiter

Saturn

Uranus

Neptune

Pluto

The first images of space that we all saw were the solar system: The 9 planets and the sun that make up our little neighborhood of the universe. It was in this little neighborhood that life as we know it began. From 5 billion years ago, when the sun began to 5 billion years from now when it will burn out, our humanity will start but may not end in this solar system.

The leftover matter surrounding the sun after it was created packed together into little clumps. The clumps attracted other clumps and they joined together to form bigger and bigger parts of matter. Farther away from the sun, where the pull of the sun's gravity was less, more matter was avaliable, resulting in the creation of larger planets such as Jupiter and Saturn.

Click here to see a movie of the formation of the solar system.

The Macmillan Book of Astronomy

Movie obtained from the Space Movie Archive