The Universe is everything we can touch, feel, sense, measure or detect. It includes living things, planets, stars, galaxies, dust clouds, light, and even time. ... The Universe contains billions of galaxies, each containing millions or even trillio...
About 4.6 billion years ago, the Solar System began to form from a gigantic cloud of dust and gas. Over millions of years, gravity's brought the gas and dust together, shrinking the cloud into a flat, spinning disc. The centre of the disc heated up and formed the Sun. The material around the Sun formed clumps, which turned into planets, asteroids, moons, and comets.
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The Solar System forms Grains of dust and ice in the sun's disc collided with each other and got stuck together. Near the Sun, chunks of rocks collided with each other to form the rocky planets. In the outer part of the disc, gas collected around chunks of rock and ice, forming the giant gas planets. Many icy chunks were left over near the disc's edge.
Giant planets
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The four planets occupy the outer part of the Solar System. Jupiter and Saturn are called gas giants because of their thick, gas-rich atmospheres. Uranus and Neptune are called ice giants because their atmospheres contain frozen methane.
The Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud Icy dwarf planets and many other small icy objects orbit the Sun in the very cold region beyond Neptune called Kuiper Belt. Farther out lies the Oort Cloud, a giant ball-shaped region made up of trillions of ice bodies. Scientists think many comets come from the Oort Cloud.
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Rocky planets The collision that formed the four inner planets produced so much heat that they were born as balls of molten rock, which then cooled and became solid on the surface.
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Asteroid Belt
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