The Solar System consists of the sun and those celestial objects bound to it by gravity, all of which formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud approximately 4.6 billion years ago. Of the retinue of objects that orbit the Sun, most of the mass is contained within eight relatively solitary planets whose orbits are almost circular and lie within a nearly flat disc called the ecliptic plane.
The four smaller inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, also called the terrestrial planets, are primarily composed of rock and metal. The four outer planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, also called the gas giants, are composed largely of hydrogen and helium and are far more massive than the terrestrials.
The Solar System is also home to two regions populated by smaller objects. The asteroid belt, which lies between Mars and Jupiter, is similar to the terrestrial planets as it is composed mainly of rock and metal. Beyond Neptune orbit lie trans Neptunian objects composed mostly of ices such as water, ammonia and methane.
Within these regions, five individual objects, Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Eris, are recognised to be large enough to have been rounded by their own gravity, and are thus termed dwarf planets. In addition to thousands of small bodies in those two regions, various other small body populations, centaurs and interplanetary dust, freely travel between regions.
The principal component of the Solar System is the Sun, a main sequence star that contains system known mass and dominates it gravitationally. The Sun four largest orbiting bodies, the gas giants, account for 99 percent of the remaining mass, with Jupiter and Saturn together comprising more than 90 percent.
Most large objects in orbit around the Sun lie near the plane of Earth orbit, known as the ecliptic. The planets are very close to the ecliptic while comets and Kuiper belt objects are frequently at significantly greater angles to it.
All of the planets and most other objects also orbit with the Sun rotation. There are exceptions, such as Halley Comet.
To cope with the vast distances involved, many representations of the Solar System show orbits the same distance apart. In reality, with a few exceptions, the farther a planet or belt is from the Sun, the larger the distance between it and the previous orbit.
A diagram is a two dimensional geometric symbolic representation of information according to some visualization technique. Sometimes, the technique uses a three dimensional visualization which is then projected onto the two dimensional surface. The word graph is sometimes used as a synonym for diagram
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