Even more imperceptible is the fact that the other seven planets are also orbiting the Sun at an astonishing speed, while all eight planets have been orbiting like this for billions of years.
What really amazes you is to count the number of times each planet revolves around the sun. At first glance, this may seem like a daunting task, but since the planet's orbits have remained largely stable over the years, we really only need to apply some basic math.
The solar system was born about 4.6 billion years ago, when the Sun was formed by clouds of dust left behind by previous stars**.
About 45900 million years ago, the giant planets – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune – came into being.
About 4.5 billion years ago, smaller rocky planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars — began to form, according to the Planetary Society. However, when planets were just born, their orbits were very different from those of today (especially giant planets).
For about 100 million years after the formation of the first planets, there was a kind of "dynamic instability" between them, which led to a gravitational tug-of-war between these large bodies and even changed some of the planetary material outside the solar system.
However, once all the planets formed and stabilized their respective positions, they entered a stable orbit and little changed since.
Sean Raymond, an astronomer and planetary system expert at the Bordeaux Astrophysics Laboratory in France, told Living Science in an email that the emerging protoplanet was ejected out of the solar system.
"The planet's orbit has been good and stable for 98 to 99 percent of the solar system's life cycle," Raymond noted. "Thus, we can estimate with considerable accuracy the number of revolutions they make around the Sun from the planet's current orbital dynamics.
In the case of Earth, it takes a year for our planet to orbit the sun and has been around for 4.5 billion years, so it has about 4.5 billion revolutions around the solar system. However, there is a significant difference in the total number of orbits of other planets because their orbital periods are longer or shorter.
Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, orbiting the Sun in just 88 days (365 per year).25 days, about 024 years). Thus, over the past 4.5 billion years, Mercury has made about 18.7 billion revolutions around the Sun.
However, Neptune, the farthest planet from the Sun, takes 60,190 days (or 164.) to complete one orbital period7 years). This means at 45In its 900 million years of history, Neptune has only made about 27.9 million revolutions around the Sun. This means that Mercury orbits the Sun about 18.7 billion times more than Neptune.
Below is a complete list of all the planets, along with their respective orbital periods and total number of revolutions around the Sun:
These numbers sound breathtaking (and they are), but most planets are likely to double the number of orbits in their remaining lifetimes.
In about another 4.5 billion years, the Sun will expand outward, reach Earth's orbit and transform into a red dwarf, which will destroy Mercury, Venus, and Earth.
Other planets may continue to exist for some time if they are not destroyed, but their orbits may change significantly.
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