Many people know that Mercury is the closest planet to the

sun, well less than half of the Earths distance. It is no

mystery, therefore, why people would assume that Mercury
is the hottest planet. For practical consideration, Mercury
The hottest planet isnt has no atmosphere, no warming blanket to help it maintain
the suns heat. Venus, on the other hand, is shrouded by an
closest to the sun unexpectedly thick atmosphere, about 100 times thicker
than our own on Earth. In fact the average temperature on
Venus is about 875 degrees F, hot enough to melt tin and
lead. The maximum temperature on Mercury, the planet
closer to the sun, is about 800 degrees F.

Chemical analysis of meteorites found in Antarctica, the

Sahara Desert, and elsewhere have been shown by various

There are Mars rocks on means to have originated on Mars. For example, some
contain pockets of gas that is chemically identical to the
martian atmosphere. These meteorites may have been
Earth blasted away from Mars due to a larger meteoroid or
asteroid impact on Mars, or by a huge volcanic eruption,
and later collided with Earth.

The greatest distance across the contiguous United States

is nearly 2,900 miles (from Northern California to Maine).

Pluto is smaller than the By the best current estimates, Pluto is just over 1400 miles
across, less than half the width of the U.S. Certainly in size
it is much smaller than any major planet, perhaps making it
USA a bit easier to understand why a few years ago it was
demoted from full planet status. It is now known as a
dwarf planet.

The elemental composition of planet Earth is mostly iron,

oxygen, silicon, magnesium, sulfur, nickel, calcium, sodium,
and aluminum. While such elements have been detected in
locations throughout the universe, they are merely trace

Almost everything on elements, vastly overshadowed by the much greater

abundances of hydrogen and helium. Thus Earth, for the
most part, is composed of rare elements. This does not
Earth is a rare element signify any special place for Earth, however. The cloud from
which the Earth formed had a much higher abundance of
hydrogen and helium, but being light gases, they were
driven away into space by the suns heat as the Earth
formed.
Normally we think of the sun as being that big, hot ball of
light 93 million miles away. But actually, the suns outer
atmosphere extends far beyond its visible surface. Our
planet orbits within this tenuous atmosphere, and we see
evidence of this when gusts of the solar wind generate the
We live inside the sun Northern and Southern Lights. In that sense, we definitely
live inside the sun. But the solar atmosphere doesnt end
at Earth. Auroras have been observed on Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus, and even distant Neptune. In fact, the outer solar
atmosphere, called the heliosphere, is thought to extend
at least 100 A.U.
You might still think of the solar system as extending out to
the orbit of the much-loved dwarf planet Pluto. We have
discovered numerous objects orbiting the sun that are
considerably farther than Pluto. These are Trans-
The edge of the solar Neptunian Objects (TNOs), or Kuiper Belt Objects
(KBOs). The Kuiper Belt, the first of the suns two reservoirs
system is 1,000 times of cometary material, is thought to extend to 50 or 60
astronomical units (AU, or the average distance of the Earth
farther away than Pluto from the sun). An even farther part of the solar system, the
huge but tenuous Oort comet cloud, may extend to 50,000
AU from the sun, or about half a light year more than a
thousand times farther than Pluto.
 It was once thought that only objects as large as planets
could have natural satellites or moons. In fact the existence
of moons, or the capability of a planet to gravitationally

Even really small bodies control a moon in orbit, was sometimes used as part of the
definition of what a planet truly is. It just didnt seem
reasonable that smaller celestial bodies had enough gravity
can have moons to hold a moon. After all, Mercury and Venus have none at
all, and Mars has only tiny moons. But in 1993, the Galileo
probe passed the 20-mile wide asteroid Ida and discovered
its one-mile wide moon, Dactyl.

Though there is certainly quite some debate currently

raging over dwarf planets, what we can agree upon is this:
There Are Five Dwarf theyre essentially large planetary bodies which havent
cleared their orbit enough to be considered their own
Planets In Our Solar planet, but which at the same time arent orbiting another
planet in a way that could cause them to be considered a
System moon. There are actually five dwarf planets in our solar
system; one of them is the recently reclassified Pluto. The
other four are Ceres, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake.

Orbiting in cold space five times farther from the sun than
Earth, Jupiter retained much higher levels of hydrogen and
helium when it formed than did our planet. In fact, Jupiter is
mostly hydrogen and helium. Given the planets mass and
Jupiter has the biggest chemical composition, physics demands that way down
under the cold cloud tops, pressures rise to the point that
ocean of any planet the hydrogen must turn to liquid. In fact there should be a
deep planetary ocean of liquid hydrogen. Computer models
show that not only is this the largest ocean known in the
solar system, but that it is about 40,000 km deep roughly
as deep as the Earth is around!
A dayon any planetis considered to be a full rotation.
Were used to this rotation taking around twenty-four
hoursand so it seems bizarre to think of spending a day
on Mercury, whose rotation lasts for nearly sixty Earth days.
Wed be waiting a long, long time for morning to come.
One Day On Mercury (Funnily enough, we can experience a rather similar
phenomenon by traveling to Antarctica, where the sun stays
Equals 58 Earth-Days below the horizon for the whole winter.) Due to Mercurys
orbit around the sun, a year on that planet is the equivalent
of around eighty-eight Earth dayswhich means that on
Mercury, there are less than two days in a year. But thats
not all: due to the planets strange orbit, the sun actually
seems to travel backwards and forwards in the sky.
Uranus is known mainly for having the most unfortunate
name of any heavenly body, and this has led to a plethora
of terrible sophomoric jokes. But there is much more to this
planet than its name. Uranus has an orbital tilt of eighty-two
degrees, which means that it is practically on its side. The
Seasons On Uranus Last effect of this is that a season on Uranus lasts about twenty
earth years, and causes all sorts of odd weather. Recently,
For Twenty Years Uranus has been coming out of a particularly long winter
storm, and will be embarking upon a decade-long spring.
The springtime of Uranus is nothing like the one on Earth,
however, as the temperature will be far below freezing, and
will feature enormous storms; all this, and more, is to be
expected in the hostile environment of Uranus.

While we have all seen many movies that feature asteroids,

some may not realize that our solar system contains both a
major asteroid belt located between Jupiter and Mars, as
Our Solar System Is (Not well as smaller asteroids grouped throughout the solar
systemsome of them fairly close to Earth. But the movies
Quite) Full of Asteroids were wrong on some crucial details: though they depict
spaceships dodging and weaving between huge rocks to
avoid being hit, the truth is that asteroids are usually spaced
so far apart that it is not really a concern at all.