In a comprehensive diagram, biologist Eleanor Lutz has painstakingly mapped every known object in the solar system that was more than 10 kilometers in diameter. This includes asteroids, comets, planets, and moons, as well as all kinds of small bodies made of rock, metals, minerals, and ice that move in orbit around the Sun.
Unlike the simple diagrams that we are used to seeing, in which usually only planets and some moons appear, the one made by Lutz allows us to take in more deeply how gigantic our solar system is and how full of objects that we should get around on a supposed space trip .
The high resolution version of this diagram can be viewed here.
Five NASA data sets
This diagram of the solar system combines five different data sets from NASA . Using these data, Lutz has mapped all the orbits of more than 18,000 asteroids, including 10,000 that were at least 10 km in diameter, and around 8,000 objects of unknown size.
Specifically, the position of each asteroid is shown on New Year’s Eve 1999.
The first thing Lutz found when he completed the diagram is that all these objects are not randomly distributed throughout the solar system, but that there are more objects in percentage terms as we get closer to the Sun. This happens due to the gravitational power of the star king: being the largest object, it is also the one with the greatest gravitational attraction.
This explains the clustering patterns in solar systems, and why the further one travels through the system, the greater the distance between the objects and the smaller their number. The gravity of the same objects, moreover, explains why most of them are fundamentally spherical : the matter that composes it is compressed by its own gravity.
That’s why not only are there planets in the shape of a sphere, but it is easier for there to be planets with this shape if they are made of ice, as Marcus Chown explains in his book Gravity :
“And since ice is easier to compress than stone, the mass threshold is different for an ice body than for another stone compound . In our solar system, all icy bodies with a diameter greater than 600 kilometers are round, while those that do not reach that diameter are amorphous. In the case of rocky objects, the threshold is around 400 kilometers ”.
Some of the largest objects in the solar system (not listed as planets) and that naturally appear in the diagram are:
- Ganymede: It is the largest moon of Jupiter, and it is 5,268 km in diameter.
- Titan : at 5,151 km, it is the largest moon of Saturn.
- Callisto : at 4,821 km, it is the second largest moon of Jupiter.
- Io : 3,643 km long, it is the moon in orbit around Jupiter.
