Mercury. Mercury is the smallest terrestrial planet in the solar system, about a third the size of Earth.
What are the smaller inner planets?
Mercury: Of the inner planets, Mercury is the closest to our Sun and the smallest of the terrestrial planets.
What are the inner planets from smallest to largest?
The inner planets, which are arranged from the smallest to largest, includes the Mercury, Mars, Venus, and Earth.
Is Mercury smaller than Pluto?
Mercury is the smallest planet in the solar system. (Pluto used to hold the title, but it was downgraded to a dwarf planet.) Although its surface resembles our moon, the tiny planet has a density that rivals Earth itself.
What is the hottest inner planet?
Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system. Although Venus is not the planet closest to the sun, its dense atmosphere traps heat in a runaway version of the greenhouse effect that warms Earth.
What 2 planets have 53 moons?
Saturn. Saturn has 53 moons that have been named. Saturn also has 29 moons awaiting confirmation.
How many inner planets are there?
The inner planets, or terrestrial planets, are the four planets closest to the Sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. Figure below shows the relative sizes of these four inner planets. This composite shows the relative sizes of the four inner planets.
What are the 4 inner planets?
Terrestrial planets also have a molten heavy-metal core, few moons and topological features such as valleys, volcanoes and craters. In our solar system, there are four terrestrial planets, which also happen to be the four closest to the sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.
Which inner planet can get the coldest?
With a temperature of -357 degrees Fahrenheit, Uranus is the coldest planet in the solar system.
What are the 4 outer planets called?
The gas giants of our solar system are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. These four large planets, also called jovian planets after Jupiter, reside in the outer part of the solar system past the orbits of Mars and the asteroid belt.
Is Pluto smaller than Russia?
Russia has a bigger surface area than Pluto.
Pluto’s surface area is 16.7 million square kilometers. Russia’s surface area is 17,098,242 sq km.
Why is Pluto a dwarf planet but not Mercury?
The International Astronomical Union (IAU) downgraded the status of Pluto to that of a dwarf planet because it did not meet the three criteria the IAU uses to define a full-sized planet. Essentially Pluto meets all the criteria except one—it “has not cleared its neighboring region of other objects.”
Is Earth a dwarf planet?
That means that according to the definition of the International Astronomical Union, the Earth cannot technically be considered as a planet and that it is, in fact, a dwarf-planet. … There were seven earth sized objects discovered in orbit around an ultracool dwarf star forty light years away using this method.
Is Venus hot or cold?
The average temperature on Venus is 864 degrees Fahrenheit (462 degrees Celsius). Temperature changes slightly traveling through the atmosphere, growing cooler farther away from the surface. Lead would melt on the surface of the planet, where the temperature is around 872 F (467 C).
Why is Venus called Earth’s sister?
Venus is a terrestrial planet and is sometimes called Earth’s “sister planet” because of their similar size, mass, proximity to the Sun, and bulk composition. It is radically different from Earth in other respects.
How close is Venus to Earth today?
The distance of Venus from Earth is currently 257,817,325 kilometers, equivalent to 1.723402 Astronomical Units. Light takes 14 minutes and 19.9860 seconds to travel from Venus and arrive to us.