SOLAR SYSTEM FACTS

The Sun is the largest body in the Solar System and it is the single most important source of energy for our planet – without it, we couldn’t have life here. The mass of the Sun is more than 330k times that of Earth.

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The Sun came into being over 4.6 billion years ago, and in about 5 more billion years it will become a red giant. It could become large enough to swallow Earth.

Venus has what is known as a retrograde rotation. What this means is that the rotation is clockwise as observed from the north pole, but it rotates around the sun in an anti-clockwise direction.

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The time it takes for Venus to orbit around the sun is 224.7 Earth days, but its 'days' last 243 Earth days, meaning its days are longer than its years.

Saturn is a gas giant and is around 96% hydrogen. The pressure, temperature and density of the gases increase toward the core of the planet. This means the hydrogen transitions from gas to liquid and to metal the deeper you go.

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The average density of Saturn is 0.69 grams per cubic metre. This means Saturn is less dense than water, meaning it would float.

When scientists analysed meteorites from Mars and rocks from the planet surface, they saw something that didn't add up. The surface rocks had 5 times the amount of nickel as the meteorites, and could only have come from a planet with an oxygen-rich atmosphere.

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Mars had oxygen in its atmosphere and the planet was warm and wet – until around 4 billion years ago.

If there was air in space, for sound to travel through, the noise from the Sun would be 125 decibels here on Earth. What makes the Sun so noisy? It is the huge amounts of nuclear activity that creates the sound.

Did you know?

The noise coming from the Sun is very nearly equal to 10 million piano key strikes.

The ring surrounding the Solar System is called the Kuiper Belt. There are trillions of frozen objects that fill the belt, and it is around 2.7 billion miles away from the Sun, making it fairly distant.

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The Kuiper Belt also contains planets, such as the former planet, Pluto

Hopefully, you already know that Earth is not flat, but it is not round either – at least technically speaking. Earth is an oblate spheroid, this means it is a little fatter near the middle and slimmer at the poles – kind of how an orange would look if pressed from the top and bottom.

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Some surveys seem to indicate the South Pole is forming an indent (dimple), while near the North Pole there are inflations (bumps).

The gravity of Jupiter is such that it attracts a lot of comets and asteroids. Jupiter's collision rate is somewhere between 2,000 to 8,000 times greater than Earth's collision rate.

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It has been speculated that without the giant asteroid magnet that is Jupiter, Earth would have witnessed many more extinction events than it has.

Venus has a very hot climate, with surface temperatures an average of 462 ºC. This is hot enough to evaporate the pyrite minerals on basalt rocks into a metallic mist. When this mist reaches high altitudes, it turns into a frost which then snows back down again.

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It rains diamonds on Jupiter and Saturn. This is due in part to the much higher atmosphere, compared to, and the greatly increased pressure. During lightning storms, the methane in the atmosphere is broken down and this, with the increased pressure, forms diamonds which then rain down.

Scientists believe there could be a 9^th planet, but they have not been able to locate it yet. astronomers Chad Trujillo and Scott S. Sheppard theorised the existence of ‘Planet 9’ because of the gravitational effects observed on a group of objects in the Kuiper Belt.

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While the proposed planet has not yet been named, researchers refer to it as ‘Phattie’.