Space is the unending void where on a fateful blue planet, life resides. It is always interesting to learn more about our vast universe with all its mysteries, and as time has and is going by, technological advancements are letting us observe and learn more about the solar system and our universe as a whole. So here are 10 facts about our solar system that will blow your mind and make you think.
Saturn is the least dense planet in our solar system, while the densest planet is Earth: The density of Saturn is lesser than that of water. This means that if someone is able to fill a container bigger than Saturn with water and put the planet in it, it would float.
The hottest planet in the solar system is Venus: Many people assume that the planet closest to the Sun would be the hottest planet in the solar system, but they are wrong. Venus is even hotter, because of an effect similar to the greenhouse effect on Earth. The clouds in Venus have an extremely high concentration of many compounds that makes the atmosphere extremely thick, i.e., approximately 100 times thicker than that of Earth. Due to this, the radiation of the sun is not able to leave the planet after having come in through the atmosphere.
The solar system also revolves as a unit through the Milky Way Galaxy: When we picture the solar system we picture it with the Sun at the centre and everything else revolves around it in elliptical orbits. This is not completely accurate. Even the Sun revolves around a central point in the Milky Way Galaxy in an elliptical orbit. So in reality, the orbit of planets is like a helix rather than an ellipse.
One year on Venus is shorter than one day!: One year on Venus is equal to 225 days on Earth. Meanwhile, one day on Venus, i.e., the time it takes to rotate once around its axis, is equal to 243 days on Earth. So 1 year on Venus is equal to 0.925 days.
There are more stars in our universe than there are grains of sand on Earth: Approximately 200 billion trillion stars have been discovered in the current known universe with more being discovered every day. To put this in further context, 200 billion trillion is 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, i.e., 2 followed by 26 0s.
If you were to land on Jupiter or any of the Outer planets, you would sink right in till you reached the core: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are the 4 outermost planets also known as the Gas giants and rightly so. The only thing solid in these four planets are their rocky cores. Apart from that it’s all gas which is why you can never step on the surface of Jupiter without sinking in and getting crushed because of the intense pressure.
The sun loses its mass at a rate of 4.21 million tonnes per second: This is something that can be calculated from Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence relation . This means that the sun produces energy, due to nuclear fusion at its core, at such a rate that it loses that much mass every second. What is marvellous is that the Sun has been producing such energy for the last 4.6 billion years and will continue to do so for the next 10 billion years, according to scientists.
Light takes approximately 8.5 minutes to reach Earth from the Sun: The speed of light is almost 300,000 kilometres per second. Even at this speed it takes light 8 minutes to reach the Earth from the sun. And if we calculate, we get the distance from the Sun to the Earth as 147 million kilometres, or 1 AU( Astronomical Unit). This just goes to show how big our universe actually is. In terms of numbers, it is 46.5 billion light years big, i.e., light would take 46 billion years to travel from one corner of the universe to another if it travelled in a straight line.
Pluto is smaller than the United States of America: The longest continuous distance in the US is from Northern California to Maine, i.e., 4700 kilometres. Pluto has a circumference of 2371 kilometeres.
Buzz lightyear, one of the protagonists of the Toy Story franchise has actually been to space!: Buzz lightyear spent 15 months on the International Space Station and returned to Earth on 11th September, 2009.