Abstract
The Solar System may be defined as consisting of all those objects that are governed by the Sun’s gravitational field. Other effects arising from the proximity of the Sun could equally well be used as criteria, such as radiation pressure or interaction with the solar wind. With any of these definitions the Solar System extends out to a distance of about two light-years; the closest star, Proxima Centauri, itself lying at a distance of slightly more than four light-years. Our knowledge of this region of space certainly does not reach as far as this, however, because the most distant Solar-System objects that we know about, the comets, seem to originate at a distance of no more than 50 000 astronomical units1, or less than a third of the total distance. As for the other Solar-System bodies known to us, they lie at distances of less than a few hundred AU. Our study is therefore confined to what is primarily the central region of the Solar System.
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Encrenaz, T., Bibring, JP., Blanc, M., Barucci, MA., Roques, F., Zarka, P. (2004). General Features of the Solar System. In: The Solar System. Astronomy and Astrophysics Library. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-10403-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-10403-3_1
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