How many distance is neptune from the sun

Also, being the Solar System's third most massive planet, Neptune is more than seventeen times as massive as the Earth. Neptune's volume is about 57 times the volume of our planet: 57 Earths could fit inside the ice giant!

Neptune is the eighth and farthest planet from the Sun. This distance creates the longest orbit of the eight planets. But unlike a Neptunian year, a day on Neptune is relatively short.

Neptune takes about Earth years to complete one orbit around the Sun. As the axial tilt of Neptune is similar to those of Mars and our planet, the ice giant has seasons just like we experience on the Earth ; each season lasts for about 40 years. Neptune rotates faster than the Earth: one average Neptunian day lasts about 16 Earth hours.

However, as the ice giant isn't a single solid object, its different parts rotate at different speeds. Neptune's equatorial zone takes about 18 hours to spin once, while the polar regions take about 12 hours to complete a rotation.

As we've already mentioned above, Neptune is the farthest planet from the Sun. Sometimes the ice giant is even farther from our star than the dwarf planet Pluto! Neptune lies at an average distance of 30 astronomical units or 4. However, sometimes the planet gets even farther than Pluto, whose highly eccentric orbit brings it inside Neptune's orbit for 20 years every Earth years. The last time this switch happened was in and lasted until As Neptune and the Earth move through space, the distance between them is constantly shifting.

When the planets are closest to each other, they lie at a distance of 4. At its farthest, Neptune lies 4. Because of its extreme distance from our planet, Neptune became the last planet of the Solar System to be discovered. The length of a trip to a planet depends on the planet's position and the spacecraft's route and speed.

The only spacecraft to visit Neptune, Voyager 2, took a dozen years to reach the ice giant. Only one spacecraft, Voyager 2, has visited Neptune. This space probe was launched in to study outer planets.

Having visited Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, it headed towards Neptune. Voyager 2 reached the blue planet in August , passing about 4, km 2, miles above its north pole. The spacecraft studied Neptune's atmosphere, magnetosphere, rings, and moons and took amazing images of the ice giant.

At the moment, there are no approved future missions to visit this distant planet. Along with Uranus, Neptune is one of two ice giants in our Solar System. Also, it's the densest of all the gas giants. Like the rest of the Solar System's planets, Neptune formed about 4.

According to scientists, the blue planet formed closer to the Sun than it is now and settled into its current position in the outer Solar System about 4 billion years ago.

At the heart of the planet, there is a solid core made of silicates, nickel, and iron, which is approximately 1. The ice giant does not have a solid surface.

The Neptunian atmosphere is made up predominantly of hydrogen and helium with a trace of methane. As Neptune lies at a great distance from the Sun, its outer atmosphere is one of the coldest places in the Solar System. Neptune's Great Dark Spot was a huge storm in the southern hemisphere of the planet at the time of the Voyager 2 flyby in The winds in the storm were the strongest ever recorded on any Solar System's planet.

By , the Great Dark Spot had disappeared completely; however, a very similar spot appeared in Neptune's northern hemisphere in Like the other giant planets, Neptune has a large satellite system. All the moons of the ice giant were named after minor water deities in Greek and Roman mythology. Neptune has 14 known moons. The first Neptune's moon to be discovered was Triton : it was first observed by William Lassell seventeen days after the discovery of the blue planet in Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.

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Others Others. Other uncategorized cookies are those that are being analyzed and have not been classified into a category as yet. Though discovered in the midth century, Neptune remained largely cloaked in mystery until , when the U. The solar system consists of the sun, which is a star and by far the largest object in the mix; eight "regular" planets, which in order from innermost to outermost are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune; five "dwarf" planets; in the neighborhood of moons, which orbit both planets and dwarf planets; about , asteroids, which orbit the sun between Mars and Jupiter; about 3, comets; and a variety of meteoroids, unknown in number.

The four innermost planets are the small terrestrial planets, so named because they are made almost entirely of rock.

The outer four planets are the giant gas planets, which consist mainly of gas surrounding a solid core. Neptune is the smallest of these, but it is still enormous compared to Earth, the largest of the terrestrial planets. Only Mercury and Venus have no moons at all. Each of the giant gas planets is surrounded by at least one ring composed of rocks and ice particles, with Saturn famed for the especially prominent rings that set it apart from all of its solar-system neighbors.

As vast as the solar system is, it is tiny compared to its immediate and more distant surroundings. The solar system is part of the Milky Way Galaxy, a spiral-shaped agglomeration of stars and interstellar dust with four arms that orbit around the galaxy's own center.

The solar system is pulled along in one of these arms at a speed of over half a million miles an hour, though of course you'd never know you were moving at such a dizzying speed. It takes the solar system about million years to orbit the center of the Milky Way. The Earth's average distance from the sun is about 93 million miles.

The reason this distance is given as an average distance is because the Earth's orbit, like all planetary orbits, is not circular but elliptical, or oval-shaped. The Earth actually ranges in distance from the sun from about 91 million miles at its closest approach to about 95 million miles six months later each year at its farthest point.

As one moves outward from the sun to each planet's orbit, the successive distance between neighboring planets grows increasingly large. The Earth's average distance of 93 million miles is called one astronomical unit, or AU. When comparing the distance between planets, it is useful to scale these in AU rather than describe them in absolute distances, because this both offers a clearer picture of the overall arrangement of planets and introduces numbers that are easier to wrap your mind around.

Mercury's distance from the sun is 0. Relatively speaking, then, given that Neptune, as mentioned, is 30 AU from the sun, the terrestrial planets are grouped in a tight cluster.