Geology of solar terrestrial planets Earth, and Mars) have substantial atmospheres; all have impact craters and tectonic surface features such as rift valleys and volcanoes. The term "inner planet" should not be confused with "inferior planet", which refers to any planet that is closer to the Sun than the observer's planet is, but usually refers to Mercury and Venus. The Solar System is believed to have formed according to the nebular hypothesis, first proposed in 1755 by Immanuel Kant and independently formulated by Pierre-Simon Laplace. This theory holds that 4.6 billion years ago the Solar System formed from the gravitational collapse of a giant molecular
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