5 Summary of Week 1
This week you have learned about what makes a planet a planet. You’ve covered the planets in our Solar System and have learned about how planetary systems and galaxies are structured. You should be able to confidently use the words star, planet, planetary system and galaxy, and be able to describe the relationships between them. Learning about how our Solar System works provides a great starting point for exploring planets around other stars, which you will be doing over the weeks to come.
You should now be able to:
- recognise the International Astronomical Union (IAU) definition of a planet
- understand the difference between planets and dwarf planets
- describe the other objects in our Solar System
- define the term ‘exoplanet’
- describe each of the following building blocks of the Universe: stars, planets, planetary systems and galaxies
- identify some objects and constellations in the night sky.
Next week you will be looking at the properties of individual planets in the Solar System in more detail.
You can now go to Week 2.
OpenLearn - An introduction to exoplanets
Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.