Amazing Facts About Space and the Solar System The nine planets, including earth, travel around the sun. These planets together with the sun makeup The Solar System. The sun is a star, like the other stars you see at night. It is a typical medium sized star. The sun is 864,000 miles in diameter, which is 100 timesthat of the earth. the gravity of the sun is nearly 28 times the gravity of the earth. the sun reads a surface temparature of about 10,000 degree farenheit with inner core temparatures reading about 30 million degrees. hence, provides enough light and heat to support allforms of life on planet Earth. the planets move around the sun along elliptical paths called orbits, a complete path around the sun is called revolution, which takes planet earthabout 3651/4 days to complete. each planet also spins or rotates on its axis, this process takes theearth a whole dayi.e 24 hours to complete. Amazing facts about the nine planets: - Mercury: is closest to the sunbut rather cold. mercury has almost no atmosphere therefore, most ofits heat escapes at night and temparature can fall to as low as -300 degree farenheit. -Earth: its atmosphere is made up of mostlynitrogen(78pcent) and oxygen(28pcent) it helps protect usfrom harmful solarradiation and meteors. -Venus: bvenus spins in the opposite direction of earth’s rotation. on venus, the sun actually rises in the west. -Mars: it has two moons. mars has its own grand canyon, called Vailes Marineris. itstretches aout 2,500 miles across the planet. -Jupiter: has 60 moons. the great spot found on jupiter is actually a huge storm that is 25,000 miles wide. -Saturn: has 31 moons of which the biggest is the titan, which is bigger dn planet mecury. -Uranus: has 21 moons. its blue lour as a result of ehane gas in its atmosphere. -Neptune: has 8 moons. in millions of years, neptunes biggest moon , the titron will get so close toit that it might break the planet and the pieces willform rings. -pluto: has only 1 moon like Earth. the first ever mission to pluto was scheduled fora 2006 launch. theprobe should reach pluto by 2015.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Jul 2013 12:11:21 +0000
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