And what did they study? They studied everything. It was the first true research institute in the history of the world. On its dark side, super bolts of lightning illuminate the clouds as first revealed by the Voyager spacecraft in 1979. The largest planet in our solar system is Jupiter. A mere one and a half billion kilometers. We are now only 80 light minutes from home. Saturn’s majestic rings are made of trillions of orbiting snowballs. If it has a solid surface, it must lie far below the clouds we see. There are new worlds to chart even this close to home. The rings of Uranus were first detected in 1977. Its moon, Charon, remained undiscovered until 1978. Only a century ago, we were ignorant even of the existence of the planet Pluto. Even in the outskirts of our own solar system, we humans have barely begun our explorations. Only four light hours from Earth is the planet Neptune and its giant satellite, Triton. We are approaching a single, ordinary, yellow dwarf star surrounded by a system of nine planets, dozens of moons, thousands of asteroids, and billions of comets: the family of the sun. Each system is isolated from its neighbors by the light years. Most stars belong to systems of two or three or many suns bound together by gravity.
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