THE BIRTH OF THE PLANETS

The nine planets including, Earth, that form our Solar System are accompanied through space by 63 moons, dozens of comets and hundreds of thousands of lumps of rock that never grew into planets. All of them are held together and guided on their journeys by the Sun, which weighs almost 1000 times as much as the rest of the Solar System put together.

The making of the Earth
After Mercury and Venus, Earth is a third planet from the Sun. This is how geologist think the Earth has developed over the past 4.6 billionb years. The whole planet and a close-up of the surface are shown for each stage.