NASA's New Solar System (not quite—this image was assembled before Pluto was de-caffeinated)

By Jack Brummet
NASA Editor & Unexplained Phenomena Editor

click to enlarge

I love browsing and plundering the NASA archives.  And the photographs are free to use anywhere.  We, the taxpayers own them!

The original caption for this montage (remember this was before the International Astronomical Union dethroned Pluto and decided there were only eight planets [1]).  "This solar-system montage of the nine planets and 4 large moons of Jupiter in our solar system are set against a false-color view of the Rosette Nebula. The light emitted from the Rosette Nebula results from the presence of hydrogen (red), oxygen (green) and sulfur (blue). Most of the planetary images in this montage were obtained by NASA's planetary missions, which have dramatically changed our understanding of the solar system in the past 30 years."

[1] The I.A.U. decided that planets need to have 3 things:

• they need to orbit the Sun
• they need to have enough gravity to pull themselves into a ball
• they need to have cleared out all other objects from their orbit

"Earth is more than 1 million times more massive than all the other material in its orbit combined, while Pluto is just a tiny fraction of the rest of the icy material around it."
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