ABSTRACT
Our solar system is a lot like a family, with eight or nine children orbiting a parent in the center. In the center of it all is a big, fat, screaming parent, the sun. The sun is constantly erupting in violent outbursts, and its deadly solar wind continually washes over everything in the solar system. Although all of the planet-children were formed at the same time as the sun and from the same cloud of gas and dust, no two planets are alike. Tiny Mercury, the baby of the family, is simultaneously roasting hot on one side and freezing cold on the other. A colorful glow in the night sky that occurs high in the atmosphere above the polar regions of Earth. A celestial body orbiting the sun that is massive enough to be rounded into a ball by its own gravity, but which has not cleared the area around its orbit of planetesimals.
