Solar System

The Solar System is the Sun and everything bound to it by gravity: the eight major planets from Mercury out to Neptune, their moons, and the belts of asteroids, comets, and icy bodies that surround them. It formed about 4.6 billion years ago from a collapsing cloud of gas and dust, and the Sun holds more than 99 percent of its total mass. Earth, the third planet, is the only world known to carry life. The Solar System is humanity's home and the home setting of Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, the science fiction series that begins with The Three-Body Problem in the China of the 1960s and the early twenty-first century.