Inferior and superior planets Inferior and superior planets In the Solar System, a planet is said to be inferior or interior with respect to another planet if its orbit lies inside the other planet's orbit around the Sun. In this situation, the latter planet is said to be superior to the former. In the reference frame of the Earth, in which the terms were originally used, the inferior planets are Mercury and Venus, while the superior planets are Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Dwarf planets like Ceres or Pluto and most asteroids are 'superior' in the sense that they almost all orbit outside
History of astronomy Jupiter in 1610, which are now collectively known as the Galilean moons, in his honor. This discovery was the first known observation of satellites orbiting another planet. He also found that our Moon had craters and observed, and correctly explained, sunspots, and that Venus exhibited a full set of phases resembling lunar phases. Galileo argued that these facts demonstrated incompatibility with the Ptolemaic model, which could not explain the phenomenon and would even contradict it. With the moons it demonstrated that the earth does not have to have everything orbiting it and that other parts of the solar system could