Professional Documents
Culture Documents
That 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
That just a pinhead of the Sun's raw material could kill someone up to
160 kilometres away!
That 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!
That 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.
That 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!
That 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!
That almost all of the heavier elements in your body (eg calcium, iron,
carbon) were made somewhere in supernovae
explosions!
That Saturn has such a low density that it would float if put in water!
That due to the fact that water expands when heated, the Atantic ocean
increses in width by 3cm every year!
That 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!
That 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!