Meteoroid, solid body orbiting the sun, becoming a meteor, or shooting star, if it enters the earth's atmosphere. The vast majority of meteroids are the size of grains of dust, but they range upward in size without any definite limit. The largest can have masses of thousands of tons. See Asteroids; Comets.
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The distance between the sun and the earth varies because the earth travels in an elliptical rather than circular orbit. The distance is r... -
Galaxy, a massive ensemble of hundreds of millions of stars, all gravitationally interacting, and orbiting about a common center. Astronomer... -
Ecliptic, in astronomy, the apparent great-circle annual path of the sun in the celestial sphere , as seen from the earth . It is so named b...