SPACE — When you’re standing on Earth’s surface, it’s easy to forget our planet is hurtling around the sun at more than 67,000 mph or 107,800 km/h. It’s even easier to forget that there are seven other planets also orbiting our star at the same speed.
These eight planets have circled the solar system non-stop for billions of years. However, it might be surprising if you know how many times each planet goes around the sun.
Calculating that number may seem difficult. But since a planet’s orbit remains largely unchanged for most of its lifetime, all it takes is a little basic math.
According to The Planetary Society, the solar system was born about 4.6 billion years ago, when the sun began to form from clouds of dust left by exploding stars. About 4.59 billion years ago, the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune were born.
Also read: Facts about the search for a ninth planet similar to Earth at the edge of the solar system
Next, around 4.5 billion years ago, the smaller rocky planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars began to form. However, when the planets were born, their orbits around the sun were not the same as today, especially the orbits of the giant planets.
For about 100 million years after the first planets formed, dynamic instability occurred between them, resulting in a gravitational tug of war between these massive bodies. “This caused the remaining planetary material in the outer solar system, and even some protoplanets (future planets) that emerged, to be thrown out of the solar system,” Sean Raymond, an astronomer at the Bordeaux Astrophysical Laboratory in France and an expert on planetary systems, told Live Science.
However, once all the planets emerge and finish jostling for position, they settle into consistent and stable orbits. Since then, their orbital positions have not changed much. “For 98 percent to 99 percent of the life of the solar system, the orbits of the planets are nice and stable,” Raymond said.
As a result, you can use the current orbital dynamics of the planets to make a fairly accurate estimate of how many times a given planet goes around the sun. Take Earth for example. Our planet takes one year or 365 days to orbit the sun. Since Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, that means it has made about 4.5 billion trips around the solar system.
The Earth has made about 4.5 billion trips around the sun since its creation. Image: Getty Images via Live Science
However, the total number of orbits of other planets varies greatly because their years are shorter or longer than our Earth’s years. Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, only takes 88 days to go around the sun once. So, over the last 4.5 billion years, it has completed about 18.7 billion orbits of the sun.
However, Neptune, the planet farthest from the Sun, takes 60,190 days to complete one orbit. This means that it has only circled the Sun around 27.9 million times in 4.59 billion years. Yes, Mercury has orbited the sun about 18.7 billion times more than Neptune.
Also Read: 5 Most Dangerous Asteroids that NASA is Hunting in the Solar System
The following is a complete list of planets, the number of years they have existed, and the total number of times they have traveled around the sun:
2023-12-11 20:36:00
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