Outer planets concepts: Outer planets The outer planets are those planets in the Solar System beyond the asteroid belt, and hence refers to the gas giants and ice giants, which are in order of their distance from the Sun: The outer planets all have ring systems, although all but Saturn's are faint when viewed from Earth. Another aspect common to the gas giants is their many natural satellites (moons), two of which are larger than the planet Mercury (Jupiter's Ganymede and Saturn's Titan). That pair and Io, Callisto, Europa, and Triton, are larger than Pluto and Eris. This region of space is
Stability of the Solar System is unlikely any of the planets will collide with each other or be ejected from the system in the next few billion years, and the Earth's orbit will be relatively stable. Since Newton's law of gravitation (1687), mathematicians and astronomers (such as Laplace, Lagrange, Gauss, Poincaré, Kolmogorov, Vladimir Arnold and Jürgen Moser) have searched for evidence for the stability of the planetary motions, and this quest led to many mathematical developments, and several successive 'proofs' of stability of the Solar System. The orbits of the planets are open to long-term variations. Modeling the Solar System is a case of the