- A day in Mercury lasts as long as 58 days, 15 hours on earth.
- Whole year on Mercury is only 88 days.
- Astronomer Neil Armstrong famous words when he stepped on the surface of the Moon were: “That’s one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind.”
- The sun isn’t round. It is flat on the top and the bottom.
- Jupiter’s magnetic field is so massive that it pours billions of Watts into Earths magnetic field every day!
- Olympus Mons on the planet Mars is the tallest volcano in the solar system. It is as high as three times Mount Everests and as wide as the entire Hawaiian island chain.
- The energy in the sunlight which we get today started in the core of the Sun 30,000 years ago. It spent most of this time passing through the dense atoms in the sun and just 8 minutes to reach us once it had left the Sun.
- The Sun makes up 99.86% of the Solar System’s mass. That means that all the planets make up about 0.14% of the Solar System’s mass.
- The length of a Plutonian year is 248 of our years! That means that one orbit of the Sun takes about 2 and a half Earth centuries. That’s a quarter of a Millennium.
- Pluto’s day is equal to 6.4 Earth days.
- Over one million Earths can fit on the sun.
- Almost all of the Oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere has been produced by living organisms.
- The Earth has the highest average density (5.52 g/cubic cm) of any planet in our Solar System.
- Jupiter’s moon Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system besides the Earth.
- Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System.
- The largest canyon system in the Solar System is Valles Marineris on Mars. It is more than 3000 miles long.
- The Earth orbits the Sun at the speed of 66,700 mph.
- Venus spins on its axis in the opposite direction as Earth and most other planets.
- On Venus the Sun rises in the west and sets in the east.
- The Hubble Space Telescope weighs 12 tons (10,896 kilograms), is 43 feet (13.1 meters) long.
- The Sun is about 4.6 billion years old. It has already used up almost half of its hydrogen supply in its core. The Sun will run out of this hydrogen supply in about 5 billion years.
- Mars has the largest mountain in the Solar System named Olympus Mons. It is 26 km high, almost 3 times taller than Mt. Everest!
- Earth is the only planet not named after pagan God.
- Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.
- The gravitational pull of a black hole is very strong. Nothing can escape from it. Therefore, it is black and has a complete absence of color.
- Mars have the largest known volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons which is 26km high.
- Neptune has the fastest winds in the solar system, reaching speeds of 2,000 km/hr.
- Space has a vacuum, so the objects become intensely hot when exposed to the Sun and extremely cold when in the shadow of Earth or some other body.
- Mercury has the longest day and Jupiter has the shortest day.
- Mercury is a fast-moving planet whereas Pluto is the slowest planet.
- Salyut and Skylab were the first spacecraft designed as space stations.
- The Earth’s climate system constantly tries to maintain a balance between the energy that reaches the Earth from the Sun and the energy that is emitted to space. Scientists refer to this process as Earth’s “radiation budget”.
- Energy goes back to space from the Earth system in two ways: reflection and emission.
- The planets Mercury and Venus are the only planets in our solar system that don’t have moons.
- Each year, the Moon steals some of Earth’s rotational energy and uses it to propel itself about 3.8 centimeters higher in its orbit. Researchers say that when the moon was formed, it was about 14,000 miles from Earth and now it is more than 280,000 miles.
- Over one million Earths can fit on the sun.
- “Moon” was the maiden name of Buzz Aldrin’s mother who was the second man on the moon.
- The only satellite that Britain has launched was called Black Arrow.
- The first man-made satellite in space was called sputnik.
- Tidal effects cause the moon to move about 3.8 cm away from Earth every year. As a result, the Earth’s rotation slows down at about .002 seconds a century and the moon casually inches toward Venus.
- The temperature at the core of the sun is 13,600,000 Kelvin.
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