11 Planets

Montana 4th Grader Wins!

FourthGrader Maryn Smith has recently won the National Geographic Planetary Mnemonic Contest with her fanciful sentence: "...My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Palace Elephants..."

What are the Eleven Planets? Let's have a refresher...

1. Mercury: Closest to our Sun, our smallest planetary body orbiting Sol every 88 days.
2. Venus: About the size of the Earth, with no moons of its own.
3. Earth: Been here lately? It's a great place to visit, with the very rarest of cosmological phenomenon: a stable liquid H20 state.
4. Mars: Our RedPlanet, smaller than home with two satellites: Deimos and Phobos.
5. Ceres: The largest sphere in the Asteroid Belt. Once regarded as an asteroid, reclassified in 2006 as a DwarfPlanet, holding its own gravitational field. There is speculation that it also has an atmosphere, prompting enormous scientific interest and research.
6. Jupiter: This gigantic planetbody hold 2.5 times the mass of all of our planetaryspheres combined. Its largest moon, Ganymede, outpaces Mercury in size.
7. Saturn: Our RingedPlanet with 60 moons! Titan, its largest satellite, is the only AtmosphericMoon currently known.
8. Uranus: The sideways orbit makes this a unique wonder. 27moons on this curious GasGiant.
9. Neptune: Much greater in density than its Uranus partner, with 13 knownmoons. Orbited by a liquid nitrogen spewing TritonMoon, with a retrograde path.
10. Pluto: Designated as a DwarfPlanet in 2006, the LargestBody in the Kuiper belt. It may be a BinarySystem, in conjunction with Charon, currently considered Pluto's LargestSatellite.
11. Eris: Only recently discovered in 2003, 27% larger than Pluto, and three times further from the Sun. This finding prompted the International Astronomical Union (IAU) to redefine the term "Planet".
12. Are There More?: Quaoar, Varuna,and Orcus, also within the Kuiper Belt, may be reclassified as DwarfPlanets in the not too distant future.