How to Use inner planet in a Sentence

inner planet

noun
  • If those planets are rocky, their surfaces are hot enough to melt tin, zinc, and on that inner planet, maybe even iron.
    — Phil Plait, Discover Magazine, 6 Apr. 2012
  • But our inner planets seem to have formed with little of the element or lost it early in their history.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 12 Apr. 2023
  • Kane’s analysis, published last month, shows that the growing star will engulf the three inner planets.
    — Quanta Magazine, 20 Dec. 2023
  • The star's inner planets have orbits that resemble Jupiter's Galilean moons.
    — Jay Bennett, Popular Mechanics, 22 Feb. 2017
  • How the light from the distant star flickers and mutates over time will provide a wealth of information about any inner planets.
    — Daniel Clery, Science | AAAS, 11 Apr. 2018
  • The comet takes 133 years to make one complete passage from deep space, toward the inner planets, around the sun, and out and back again.
    — Jeffrey Kluger, Time, 11 Aug. 2023
  • This is typically true with Venus and Mercury, the two inner planets.
    — Jamie Carter, Forbes, 17 Jan. 2025
  • The inner planets, including Earth, took at least 100 million years, maybe more.
    — Lucas Brefka, The Conversation, 19 May 2025
  • That’s because Jupiter acts as a shield for the inner planets of the solar system, including Earth.
    — Benjamin Roulston, Discover Magazine, 7 Nov. 2024
  • The inner dots represent the inner planets, while the orange dot represents Jupiter.
    — David Grossman, Popular Mechanics, 21 Dec. 2018
  • Webb pinpointed the inner disk — roughly where Earth and the inner planets would have formed in our solar system — as the birthplace of these crystals.
    — Samantha Mathewson, Space.com, 26 Jan. 2026
  • The other inner planet, Mercury, is also visible this week just before sunrise.
    — Jamie Carter, Forbes, 31 Oct. 2021
  • Furthermore, the two planets are orbiting in a resonance, with the inner planet circling its star twice as often as the outer planet.
    — Korey Haynes, Discover Magazine, 3 June 2019
  • Earth orbits the sun at more than 30 km/s, so firing a probe at the sun or the inner planets is extremely hard because of all that sideways velocity.
    — Phil Plait, Scientific American, 19 June 2025
  • All of the planets are larger than Earth, with the two inner planets just slightly larger and the other five planets even bigger, about twice the size of Earth.
    — Kerry Breen, CBS News, 3 Nov. 2023
  • Among the inner planets, only Mars has known Trojans—10 of them, the biggest measuring about 2 kilometers across.
    — Richard Lovett, Science | AAAS, 20 Oct. 2017
  • Both worlds may have migrated early in their lives, which would have shifted their positions around the sun and sent barrages of water-rich comets cascading toward Earth and other inner planets.
    — Shannon Hall, Scientific American, 30 Mar. 2023
  • The instability also scattered oddball moons and asteroids and triggered smaller bodies to pummel the inner planets.
    — Paul Voosen, Science | AAAS, 21 Jan. 2020
  • This phenomenon provides the best opportunity to observe these inner planets without interference from the sun's glare.
    — Daniel R. Depetris, Newsweek, 10 Jan. 2025
  • Venus, an inner planet as seen from Earth, was between the Earth and the sun on March 23, having spent the previous few months approaching Earth.
    — Jamie Carter, Forbes.com, 25 Apr. 2025
  • Planet Nine’s gravitational influence could even serve as a solution to the long-standing mystery of why the sun’s axis of spin is tilted six degrees askew to the orbits of the inner planets.
    — Lee Billings, Scientific American, 22 Mar. 2018
  • Saturn Slightly higher than both inner planets will be Saturn, which at magnitude 1 may require careful scanning in the bright twilight with a pair of binoculars.
    — Jamie Carter, Space.com, 26 Feb. 2026
  • Earth, which is protected by a thick, but livable atmosphere enabled by our own internal energy source—the spinning dynamo of our molten iron core—is the only inner planet with adequate protection from the sun.
    — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 16 Oct. 2020
  • The young, cool star is orbited by four inner planets, one of which has just formed a large moon in the aftermath of a giant impact, followed by an asteroid belt, four gas giants, a Kuiper belt, and an Oort cloud.
    — Ethan Siegel, Big Think, 2 Oct. 2025
  • This revealed a stellar object very similar to a red supergiant star, a body hundreds of times the size of the sun, which, if placed at the heart of our solar system, would engulf the rocky inner planets and graze the orbit of Jupiter.
    — Robert Lea, Space.com, 22 Jan. 2026
  • Instead, all planetary systems fortunate enough to host a gas giant in their outskirts should automatically have water-rich material falling on their rocky inner planets.
    — Nola Taylor Redd, Smithsonian, 20 June 2018
  • As our solar system formed, the early sun blasted the inner planets with radiation and high-speed plasma, which drove off most of the gases (hydrogen, water vapor and CO2).
    — Scott Denning, Washington Post, 4 May 2018
  • In doing so, scientists say the planet's gravity not only stabilized the inner planets' orbits but also shaped the structure of the solar system, carving out rings and gaps that influenced how, and when, rocky bodies formed.
    — Sharmila Kuthunur, Space.com, 24 Oct. 2025
  • Venus and Mercury, which orbit close to the sun, can only ever be seen close to sunrise or sunset, which is why planet arcs always happen just before sunrise or just after sunset, when one or both of the inner planets are visible.
    — Jamie Carter, Forbes.com, 11 Aug. 2025
  • Accordingly, unlike the inner planets that move quickly and govern daily activities, Uranus defines major periods of life with its prolonged revolutions.
    — Aliza Kelly Faragher, Allure, 26 Apr. 2018

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'inner planet.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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