- Solar System is 4.6 billion years old. So old, it’s a Senior Solar System.
- Planet Uranus or Uranus – you can’t win either way - rotates on its side, and astronomers have no idea why the planet has chosen such an unusual position.
- Our Sun is insanely massive! Want some proof? Well, 99.86% of all mass in the Solar System is the mass of the Sun - in particular, the hydrogen and the helium it's made of.
- Earth might not be the only tectonically active planet in Solar System. Astronomers have spotted some landforms looking like cliffs on Mercury!
- Behind orbit of Neptune, lies the mysterious Kuiper Belt, filled with massive icy objects. The most curious thing about this space formation, though, is that scientists can’t explain the pattern of its movement.
- While we have volcanoes spilling lava on our planet, volcanoes on Pluto spit... ice!
- One of the Saturn's moons, Lapetus, has a unique color - it's two toned. One of its hemispheres is light, and other is eerily dark.
- The Sun's atmosphere stretches far beyond its visible surface. And our planet is right within its reach.
- The Sun's atmosphere is hotter than the surface of the star. While on the surface, the temperatures reach 10,000 degrees F, the upper atmosphere heats up to millions of degrees!
- Our Solar System isn't the only one in the Milky Way Galaxy. Far from it, the galaxy we live in houses about 100 billion solar systems!
- Since Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, many people simply assume that it's also the hottest. And that's where they get it wrong because, in fact, Venus (which is about 30 million miles further from the Sun than Mercury) is way hotter!
- The most enormous volcano in the whole Solar System is on Mars!
- The valley called Valles Marineris, on Mars, is more than 10 times larger than Earth's Grand Canyon.
- On the surface of Jupiter, there’s a weird region that's called the Great Red Spot. Recently, astronomers have concluded that this spot is actually storm that’s been raging on planet for centuries.
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