Mercury and Venus are the only two planets in our solar system that do not have any moons.
100 Mind-Blowing Planets Facts
Most known asteroids in our solar system are located between Jupiter and Mars. Research has found that the main meteor belt resides and orbits between the two planets. This main asteroid belt is found to be more than two and a half times as far as the Earth is from the sun.
Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise. Most planets rotate on their axis in an anti-clockwise motion. However, Venus rotates clockwise in retrograde once every 243 Earth days.
It won’t be possible to walk on planets like Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn or Uranus as they don’t have a solid surface and are made of gases mostly.
Out of all the planets, Venus is the only one to spin clockwise.
All planets spin counterclockwise except for Venus.
Jupiter’s magnetic field is bigger than the Moon. The region of space in which a mass’s magnetic field dominates is known as its magnetosphere. These regions surround planets, pulsars and even our Galaxy. The planets in our Solar System have magnetospheres that interact with and are shaped by the charged particles in the wind streaming from our Sun. The largest magnetosphere in our Solar System surrounds Jupiter. Jupiter rotates very fast and has a very strong magnetic field, and its magnetosphere is filled with plasma from its volcanically active moon, Io. These features, coupled with the fact that the solar wind is slower and less dense at Jupiter than at Earth, lead to a very sizeable Jovian magnetosphere. It is easily big enough to contain a body the size of our Sun and, if visible, would be larger than the Moon in our night sky; quite an achievement considering that it is over 1,500 times farther away.
Planets can wander through space without a parent star. Not all planets form and stay around stars: astronomers estimate that there could be more than 200 billion of them floating free and drifting through our Galaxy. These ‘rogue’ planets were thought to have been kicked out of their home systems. While this is true for some, other planets may have formed completely independently of an accretion disk (as was the case for our Solar System) instead of forming from the collapse of tiny, cold clouds known as globulettes.
Venus spins backwards. Venus spins in the opposite direction to the rest of the planets in our Solar System. This is a puzzle that requires solving if we are to understand more about the formation and evolution of our Solar System. Could it be that, in the early days of the Solar System, Venus was hit by another object, sending it spinning in the opposite direction? The truth is, there is no confirmed theory as to why Venus spins backwards relative to the other planets. But that’s not the only strange thing about Venus’s orbit. The planet also rotates slowly, with the Venusian day equivalent to 243 Earth days, and longer than the Venusian year of 225 Earth days.
Uranus is the coldest planet in the Solar System. Some facts about space seem to defy simple logic. Neptune is the farthest planet from the Sun, so you might expect it to be the coldest planet. But it’s not: Uranus is. The question is, why is Uranus the coldest planet in the Solar System? Could Uranus’s plummeting temperature be related to the planet’s atmosphere? Did Uranus lose most of its primordial heat early in its life? Or could it be related to the planet’s strange tilt, relative to the rest of the planets that orbit our Sun?
Hail storms are common. But, some planets have diamond storms. On Saturn and Jupiter, lightning strikes carbon soot and hardens into graphite. Then, the material becomes pressurized during the storm and becomes a diamond. The result is diamond hail.
Ancient astronomers. Of the eight planets in the Solar System, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were observed by Babylonian astronomers as early as the 2nd millennium BC. The Greek Aristarchus of Samos (310–230 bc) also correctly observed the position of Earth about the planets – known as the heliocentric model.
An innovative clock was built in China in 1090. A man named Su Song created a water-powered clock tower that measured time and tracked the movements of the planets and stars in the night sky. Su Song built a giant water wheel within the clock tower. Buckets attached to the wheel would fill with water and then tip once full, causing the wheel to rotate, demarcating time.