Physical Science Chapter 15 The Solar System
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21 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 Planet | an object must be orbiting the Sun, nearly spherical, and large enough to clear all matter from its orbital zone. |
| Dwarf Planet | is defined as an object that is orbiting the Sun, is nearly spherical, but has not cleared matter from its orbital zone and is not a satellite. |
| Small Solar System Bodies | All objects in the solar system that are not planets, dwarf planets, or moons. |
| astronomical Unit (AU) | a measurement for distances based on the distance from earth to the sun |
| Terrestrial Planets | The name given to the four inner planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars |
| Giant Planets | Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune |
| Comet | a mass that travels through space and is composed of rock particles and dust mixed with frozen water, methane, and ammonia; tends to vaporize and break up after passing close to the Sun many times |
| Oort Cloud | a hypothetical huge collection of comets orbiting the sun far beyond the orbit of Pluto |
| Kuiper Belt | a disk-shaped region of small icy bodies some 30 to 100 AU from the Sun; the source of short-peroid comets |
| Asteroids | small, rocky bodies orbiting the Sun and lying mainly in a narrow belt between Mars and Jupiter. |
| Meteoroids | remnants of comets and asteroids in space |
| Meteor | A streak of light in the sky produced by the burning of a meteoroid in Earth's atmosphere |
| Meteor Shower | an event in which many meteorites fall in a short peroid of time. |
| Meteorite | stony or metallic object that is the remains of a meteoroid that has reached the earth's surface |
| Protoplanet Nebular Model | the earliest stage in the formation of a planet. |
| Ptolemaic System | geocentric model of the structure of the solar system that uses epicycles to explain retrograde motion. |
| Copernican System | heliocentric, or suncentered solar system model developed by Nicholas Copernicus in 1543 |
| Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion | three laws describing the motion of the planets in the solar system. |
| Kepler's First Law | states that each planet moves in an orbit that has the shape of an ellipse, with the Sun located at one focus |
| Kepler's Second Law | states that an imaginary line betweent the Sun and a planet moves over equal areas of the ellipse during equal time intervals. |
| Kepler's Third Law | states that the square of the peroid of a planet's orbit is proportional to the cube of that planet's semimajor axis. |
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