The Sun makes up 99.86% of the Solar
System's mass! That means that all the planets put together (including
Jupiter) as well as all the asteroids only make up about 0.14%
of the Solar System's mass
Jupiter's magnetic field is so massive
that it pours billions of Watts into Earths magnetic field every
day!
A massive body 100km wide travelling
at over 512,000km/h crashed into Mercury to form the Caloris Basin.
The impaact was so great it sent shockwaves round Mercury creating
its hilly lineated terrain.
Just a pinhead of the Sun's raw material
could kill someone up to 160 kilometres away!
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 Millenium!
Olympus Mons (on Mars) is the largest
Volcanic mountain in the Solar System. It is 600 km across and
27 km high! And you thought Mount Everest (about 8 and a half
km high) was tall! To see a great overhead picture of it click
here.
A Supernova explosion produces more energy
in its first ten seconds than the Sun during the whole of its
10 billion year lifetime and that for a brief period, it creates
more energy than the rest of a galaxy put together!!
The comet with the longest ever recorded
tail is the Great Comet of 1843. Its tail stretched over 800 million
kilometres! This is about the same distance the Earth is from
Jupiter!
The energy in the sunlight we see today
started out in the core of the Sun 30,000 years ago - it spent
most of this time passing through the dense atoms that make the
sun and just 8 minutes to reach us once it had left the Sun!
Almost all of the heavier elements in
your body (eg calcium, iron, carbon) were made somewhere in supernovae
explosions!
Some rocks found on Earth are actually
pieces of Mars!
Saturn has such a low density that it
would float if put in water!
Due to the fact that water expands when
heated, the Atantic ocean increses in width by 3cm every year!
Some volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io eject
material at speeds of up to 1km/second! This is about 20 times
faster than the volcanoes here on Earth can manage it!
The amount of the Sun's energy reaching
the Earth's atmosphere (known as the Solar constant) is equivalent
to 1.37 kw of electricity per square metre!
