Our Sun and eight planets with their moons make up what astronomers call the “Solar System”. Although our Solar System is not the only one in the galaxy, scientists have not yet found the one like it. Each planet in the Solar System is as unique as the system in which it orbits. As a matter of fact, eight planets have very few attributes in common. They similarly orbit around the Sun, and they have largely the same chemical compositions. Beyond those two properties, the planets contrast far more sharply than they neatly compare.

The Sun’s gravity and magnetic field, called the “heliosphere”, envelop the major planets and all the dwarf planets in the Solar System. Although we frequently represent the planets’ orbits as circular, the major planets actually trace cosmic ellipses as they rotate around the Sun.

The planets take their names from Roman gods and goddesses. Of course, “Jupiter”, by far the largest of the eight planets, is named for the King of the Roman gods. Saturn, frigid and ice-bound almost beyond measure and imagination, paradoxically carries the name of the Roman god of agriculture. Mars, relatively small and desolate, carries the name of the Romans’ war god.

Although astronomy is the oldest science, it continues to be at the forefront of not only scientific thought, but that of the public at large too. Who has not looked up at the galaxy while walking home late at night and wondered? Having said that though, the ancient people of certainly the northern hemisphere, but probably both, knew the movements of the stars and planets better than most of us do nowadays.

They understood then, thousands of years ago, that the majority of stars appear to rise in the Eastern skies at night and travel on circular paths. They also noticed that some ‘stars’ were ‘wanderers’ (we call them planets) and that sometimes they went ‘against the flow’.

They also named groups of stars that we now call constellations or even galaxies and knew that those visible in the winter were different from those visible in the summer.and that others were visible all year round. The average common man of 5,000 – 10,000 years ago almost certainly knew more about the movement of the celestial bodies than the average common man of today does. (I mean men and women here, of course).