the.com/solar system
The sun's gravity keeping eight planets from running off and ghosting it.
means The sun, plus everything bound to it by gravity — planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and loose debris — all orbiting together through space.
from From Latin 'solaris' (of the sun), itself from 'sol' (sun), joined to 'system' from Greek 'systema' (an organized whole, things standing together). The phrase itself is a fairly plain 17th-century coinage, assembled once astronomers like Copernicus and Kepler had made the sun, rather than the Earth, the thing everything else was clearly organized around.
- mass hog
- Sun holds 99.86 percent of all the mass
- edge location
- Oort Cloud may extend nearly halfway to next star
- flat disk
- Planets orbit roughly same plane, like a cosmic pancake
- eternal wobble
- Jupiter's gravity nudges the sun slightly off center