China is spending 3 billion dollars to build panda-shaped solar farms to get more young people interested in renewable energy.
100 Mind-Blowing Solar Facts
Mercury and Venus are the only two planets in our solar system that do not have any moons.
The tallest mountain in our solar system, Olympus Mons, is 3 times taller than Mount Everest.
There are more volcanoes on Venus than on any other planet within our solar system.
Although Saturn is the second-largest planet in our solar system, it is also the lightest planet!
The Earth is the only planet in our solar system not named after either a Greek or Roman God.
Our solar system has a wall. The heliopause – the region of space in which solar wind isn’t hot enough to push back the wind of particles coming from distant stars – is often considered the “boundary wall” of the Solar System and interstellar space.
It rains methane on Saturn’s largest moon. Titan is the only moon in our Solar System with a dense atmosphere and the only body except Earth with liquid rivers, lakes and seas fed by rainfall. This rainfall isn’t water, though; it’s liquid methane.
Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system.
Some fungi create zombies and then control their minds. The tropical fungus Ophiocordyceps infects ants’ central nervous systems. Once it has been in an insect’s body for nine days, it has complete control over the host’s movements. According to National Geographic, it forces the ant to climb trees, then convulse and fall into the cool, moist soil below, where fungi thrive. Once there, the fungus waits until exactly solar noon to force the ant to bite a leaf and wait for death.
Neptune was the first planet that was discovered before being seen through a telescope. Neptune stands out from the rest of the solar system because it was the first planet discovered by Urbain Le Verrier through mathematical prediction rather than an encounter.
Mount Everest is not the tallest mountain in our solar system. This title goes to Olympic Mons, which is said to be three times as big as Everest. This mountain can be found on the planet Mars.
Uranus takes 84 years to orbit the sun. This is longer than any of the other planet’s orbits in our solar system. One rotation on Uranus is around 17 hours long. It is also the coldest planet in our solar system.
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.
Jupiter is made entirely of gases. Yup, the biggest planet in the solar system is almost like a fart.
A solar eclipse once ended a six-year war. In 585 BCE, the sky suddenly darkened during a battle between the Lydians and the Medes. The soldiers saw it as a sign to stop fighting.
The Super Soaker was designed and invented by a NASA engineer. Lonnie Johnson used the royalties from his 1989 invention to fund research on solar power.
Our solar system is 4.6 billion years old.
Mars has the largest volcanoes and canyons in the entire solar system.
The tallest mountain in the solar system, at over 15 miles high, is on Mars.
The Solar System consists of a wall – it’s called the “boundary wall.”
Mars is smaller than Earth with a diameter of 4217 miles. This makes it the second smallest planet in our solar system.
Mars is home to Olympus Mons, a dormant volcano and the largest volcano and highest mountain in our solar system. It is 16 miles high and 600 km across the base, making it 3x the height of Mount Everest.
Mars has the largest canyon in our solar system, Valles Marineris. It is 4 miles deep and stretches thousands of miles long.
On Mercury, a day is twice as long as a year. Technically, one Mercurian day lasts 59 Earth days, while a year lasts 88. However, due to Mercury’s very eccentric orbit and alignment with the Sun, the length of time from sunrise to sunrise, known as a ‘solar day’, is equal to 176 Earth days — twice as long as a Mercurian year.
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.
The Sun loses a billion kilos per second. Particles in the Sun’s upper atmosphere are so hot and energetic that they speed out into space as part of the solar wind. Our star sheds around 1.3 trillion trillion trillion particles every second. This equates to roughly one billion kilograms of matter per second, or one Earth every 185 million years.
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?
5 billion Suns could fit in UY Scuti, one of the biggest known stars. Compared to the rest of the worlds of our Solar System – even colossal Jupiter – our Sun is pretty big. But it’s nothing compared to the biggest stars we know of red hypergiant stars that would positively dwarf our Sun if ever there was a cosmic ‘who’s the biggest star?’ contest. UY Scuti is one such stellar giant. It’s often referred to as the biggest known star in the Universe (although this can’t definitively be proven). But what calculations have revealed is that if UY Scuti were to replace our Sun, its outer edge would sit beyond the orbit of Jupiter. 5 billion Suns, 7 trillion Jupiters or 7 quadrillion Earths would fit inside UY Scuti! What’s more, UY Scuti is 300,000 times brighter than the Sun but is so far away you wouldn’t know this when observing it in our night sky.
Jupiter is the fastest-spinning planet in the solar system (it only takes about 10 hours to complete a full rotation on its axis).
The Solar System formed about 4.6 billion years ago.
Jupiter is the fastest-spinning planet in the solar system.
Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system, with temperatures of over 450 degrees Celcius.
For years it was believed that Earth was the only planet in our solar system with liquid water. More recently, NASA revealed its strongest evidence yet that there is intermittent running water on Mars, too!
Comets are leftovers from the creation of our solar system about 4.5 billion years ago – they consist of sand, ice and carbon dioxide.
The name “coronavirus” is derived from the Latin word “corona,” meaning “crown” or “halo.” This refers to the appearance of a crown or a solar corona around the virus particles.
Afghan poppy farmers have switched to solar power to run their irrigation systems. This has significantly increased the world’s supply of heroin.
Google uses the same amount of energy as 200,000 homes. It’s no surprise this tech powerhouse needs a lot of power! That accounts for about 0.013% of the entire world’s energy use. And while not all of their energy is from wind and solar, they purchase carbon offsets which leaves them with no carbon footprint!
The dark region on the north pole of Pluto’s moon, Charon, is called Mordor. In July 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft became the first spacecraft to fly past Pluto, the formerly ninth planet in our solar system. NASA called on the general public to aid them in giving names to the many new features of Pluto they expected to find, and the general public certainly didn’t disappoint. Not only did they name a dark spot on Charon’s moon after Sauron’s holdout in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, but they also named a dark spot on Pluto’s south pole Cthulu from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulu Mythos!
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.
There are two ways to think of the length of a day on Earth. Though you probably learned that one day on Earth is 24 hours, it takes the planet 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.0916 seconds to rotate on its axis. This is the difference between a solar day and a sidereal day—a solar day is 24 hours, whereas a sidereal day is roughly four minutes shorter. We measure solar time based on the sun’s position in the sky; a sidereal day is measured based on the location of the “fixed” stars. In other words, a sidereal day is the time it takes for a distant star or constellation to appear on the same meridian.
We can thank the railroad industry for standardising our time zones. Until the 19th century, towns and villages synchronised their clocks to the local solar noon. This created thousands of local times that all varied and made scheduling transportation a major headache. Train schedules in different cities had to list dozens of arrival and departure times for each train to account for all the mini-time zones. On November 18, 1883, railroad companies in the United States and Canada began using a system very similar to the standardised time zones we still use today. In the UK, the railroad companies began using a standard London-based time in 1840.