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Our solar system is more than a list of eight planets. A star, planets, moons, dwarf planets, and countless small bodies born from one nebula share 4.6 billion years of history as one vast family.
A cloud of interstellar gas and dust collapsed into the spinning solar nebula. The Sun formed at its center while material in the disk collided and gathered into planets and smaller bodies. The Sun ultimately held more than 99% of the system's matter.
Near the young Sun, only rock could endure the heat, producing the solid worlds from Mercury through Mars. Farther out, gases and ices accumulated into the giant planets. Today's arrangement still resembles the temperature map of that early disk.
Voyager 1 looked back from beyond Neptune and captured 60 frames. Six planets appeared as tiny points in the mosaic, while Earth became the less-than-one-pixel “Pale Blue Dot”—a new way to feel the scale of our solar system.