Solar System Explorer

Panther Mountain — A Hidden Catskill Crater?

About 380 million years ago, during the Devonian Period, geologists believe a meteorite roughly 1,000 feet (300 meters) wide slammed into what is now the Catskill Mountains of New York. The impact carved out a crater roughly 6 miles (10 km) across. Today, that crater is hidden beneath layers of younger rock and forest, but you can still see its shape: two streams — Esopus Creek and Woodland Creek — wrap in a near-perfect circle around Panther Mountain. That circular drainage pattern is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for an impact origin. Gravity surveys also show the rock under Panther Mountain is denser than expected — consistent with shock-fractured material packed back into a crater bowl.

Panther Mountain matters because it's the only suspected impact structure in New York State. But it's not unusual for the solar system. Rocky bodies smash into one another constantly. The question is: which objects are most likely to cross Earth's path?

What the Numbers Tell Us About a Planet

Six columns. That's it. From those six columns of the Solar System Objects Data Table, you can figure out almost everything you need to know about a planet:

Mean distance from Sun tells you where it lives. Period of revolution tells you how long its year is — and notice the pattern: the farther a planet is, the longer its year. Period of rotation tells you how long its day is. Compare Jupiter's 9 hours and 50 minutes to Venus's 243 days — gas giants spin fast, Venus spins backward and slow. Eccentricity tells you how circular the orbit is. Equatorial diameter tells you the size — and right there you can spot the difference between terrestrial planets (small) and Jovian planets (huge). Axial tilt tells you whether the planet has seasons (Earth: 23.49°), barely any (Mercury: 0.03°), or whether it spins on its side like Uranus (97.77°).

Reading this table well is a Regents-level skill — and it's how working planetary scientists actually think about the solar system every day.

Why Eccentricity Actually Matters

Eccentricity is not just a number on the data table — it changes what you would see and feel if you were on the planet. The more eccentric the orbit, the more the planet's distance from the Sun changes during a single year.

At perihelion (the closest point), two things happen at once: the Sun appears larger in the sky because it is nearer, and the Sun's gravity pulls harder, speeding the planet up. At aphelion (the farthest point), the Sun shrinks into a smaller dot, gravity weakens, and the planet slows down. Earth's tiny eccentricity of 0.017 makes the apparent size change barely noticeable from one season to the next. Pluto's 0.250 means the Sun shifts dramatically in size and pull across its 248-year journey — at perihelion Pluto is actually closer to the Sun than Neptune is.

From Seasons to Ice Ages

Earth's axial tilt is the engine behind every season Long Island has ever experienced. When the Northern Hemisphere tilts toward the Sun, sunlight strikes the ground more directly, days are longer, and we get summer. When it tilts away from the Sun, sunlight comes in at a low angle, days shrink, and we get winter. The Sun's distance is barely the issue — Earth is actually closest to the Sun in early January, during NY winter. It is the angle of sunlight that matters.

But the tilt itself is not fixed forever. Over cycles of about 41,000 years, Earth's tilt slowly wobbles between roughly 22.1° and 24.5° — small changes that dramatically alter how much sunlight reaches the poles. Lower tilt means milder summers, which can leave winter snow and ice unmelted year after year. That feedback loop has helped trigger every major ice age in Earth's history — including the one that scraped Long Island flat and dropped its terminal moraine across the middle of the Island only ~20,000 years ago. The Ronkonkoma and Harbor Hill moraines you can see on a NY bedrock map are direct evidence of axial tilt at work.