Our solar system is centered on a single star—the sun—that contains almost a thousand times more stuff than all of the other objects in the solar system put together!

If you could look down from high above the north pole of the sun, you would see planets revolving around it in a counterclockwise direction. By the way, that's the same direction the sun rotates.

Although their orbits each appear to be circles, if you look very closely you'll see that each planet's orbit is actually an oval—or ellipse.

Most of the planets, in turn, rotate around their axes in the same counterclockwise direction as the sun. But Venus and Uranus rotate clockwise from this perspective.