Energy & Green Tech

New all-liquid iron flow battery for grid energy storage

A commonplace chemical used in water treatment facilities has been repurposed for large-scale energy storage in a new battery design by researchers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The ...

Energy & Green Tech

Dig deep: US bets on geothermal to become renewable powerhouse

Though geothermal represents only a tiny fraction of current US energy production, several businesses and President Joe Biden's administration are betting on technological advances to make it a backbone of the green transition.

Energy & Green Tech

Predicting energy yields for photovoltaic systems

The journey toward a sustainable future hinges on our ability to harness the power of renewable sources effectively. Solar energy, in particular, has emerged as a cornerstone of this transition. However, the unpredictable ...

Energy & Green Tech

Strengthening the grid's 'backbone' with hydropower

Argonne-led studies investigate how hydropower could help Alaska add more clean energy to its grid, how it generates value as grids add more renewable energy, and how liner technology can improve hydropower efficiency.

Electronics & Semiconductors

A solar cell you can bend and soak in water

Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science and collaborators have developed an organic photovoltaic film that is both waterproof and flexible, allowing a solar cell to be put onto clothes and still function ...

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Solar System

The Solar System[a] consists of the Sun and those celestial objects bound to it by gravity, all of which formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The Sun's retinue of objects circle it in a nearly flat disc called the ecliptic plane, most of the mass of which is contained within eight relatively solitary planets whose orbits are almost circular. The four smaller inner planets; Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, also called the terrestrial planets, are primarily composed of rock and metal. The four outer planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, also called the gas giants, are composed largely of hydrogen and helium and are far more massive than the terrestrials.

The Solar System is also home to two main belts of small bodies. The asteroid belt, which lies between Mars and Jupiter, is similar to the terrestrial planets as it is composed mainly of rock and metal. The Kuiper belt (and its subpopulation, the scattered disc), which lies beyond Neptune's orbit, is composed mostly of ices such as water, ammonia and methane. Within these belts, five individual objects, Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Eris, are recognised to be large enough to have been rounded by their own gravity, and are thus termed dwarf planets. The hypothetical Oort cloud, which acts as the source for long-period comets, may also exist at a distance roughly a thousand times beyond these regions.

Within the Solar System, various populations of small bodies, such as comets, centaurs and interplanetary dust, freely travel between these regions, while the solar wind, a flow of plasma from the Sun, creates a bubble in the interstellar medium known as the heliosphere, which extends out to the edge of the scattered disc.

Six of the planets and three of the dwarf planets are orbited by natural satellites, usually termed "moons" after Earth's Moon. Each of the outer planets is encircled by planetary rings of dust and other particles.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA