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Quirky facts about the Solar System |
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Did you know this about our Solar System?
- Not all the planets in our solar system are solid.
The inner planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are called rocky or terrestrial planets. The outer planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are actually known as the 'gas giants' (although a more accurate way to describe their make-up is fluid.) They are incredibly hot in their cores and beneath their atmospheres these planets are most likely entirely liquid.
- Mercury has such a cratered surface because it has no atmosphere to weather and erode craters.
What little atmosphere there is, gets blown away by powerful solar winds.
- One day on Mercury is actually 2 Mercury years long.
How so? A day is the time a planet takes to turn all the way around itself, and a year is the time taken for a planet to revolve around the Sun. Mercury whizzes twice around the Sun, before it has finished spinning around once.
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Venus is really bright. It is covered with thick clouds that reflect lots of sunlight back to Earth.
- Even though Mercury is the planet closest to the Sun, Venus is the hottest planet.
The Sun heats Venus just like it heats the inside of a car on a hot day when the windows are rolled up. Light from the Sun comes through the windows but gets trapped by the glass and can't escape. On Venus, light from the Sun gets trapped under the thick clouds that cover the planet and can't escape. This is called the greenhouse effect. The average temperature is 480 C!
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The Earth is the only habitable planet in the solar system.
Three quarters of the earth is covered by water.
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Mars is red because it has a surface of iron oxide. Another word for iron oxide is rust!
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Mars has a huge vocano called Olympus Mons and it is 3 times higher than Mt Everest and the highest volcano of the solar system.
That makes it 23 km high!
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Jupiter's Great Red Spot is actually the longest lasting storm in the Solar System.
It has been raging for more than 300 years and is twice the size of the Earth.
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Saturn is not the only planet in the solar system that has rings.
Neptune, Uranus and Jupiter all have rings too.
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The beautiful rings around Saturn are actually made up of billions of chunks of ice and rock- some as big as houses.
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If you could take the planets for a swim, Saturn is the only planet that would float because it is the only planet less dense than water.
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Uranus turns in a way totally different to the other planets.
Somewhere in the history of the solar system, some large planet sized object, probably knocked it sideways. It rotates on its side now as if it has been tipped over.
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Neptune has the fastest winds in the solar system.
They can blow at 2,000 km an hour.
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The planet Neptune has an atmosphere of high pressure methane that is perfect for making diamonds.
That means that diamonds can rain from the sky.
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