Facts about planets

• The Sun makes up 99.86 per cent of the Solar System’s mass! That means if all the planets were put together (including Jupiter) as well as all the asteroids it will only make up about 0.14 per cent of the Solar System’s mass.

• Jupiter’s magnetic field is so massive that it pours billions of Watts into Earth’s magnetic field everyday!

• A massive body 100km wide travelling at over 512,000km/h crashed into Mercury to form the Caloris Basin. The impact
was so great that it sent shockwaves round Mercury creating its hilly lineated terrain.

• The length of a plutonian year is 248 of our years! That means that one orbit of the Sun takes about two and a half Earth
centuries. That’s a quarter of a millennium!

• The Olympus Mons (on Mars) is the largest Volcanic Mountain on the planet Mars and the tallest known volcano in the Solar
System. It is 600km across and 27km high, which is three times as tall as the Mount Everest.

• A supernova explosion produces more energy in its first ten seconds than the Sun during the whole of its 10 billion years’
lifetime.

• The comet with the longest ever recorded tail is the Great Comet of 1843. Its tail stretched over 800 million kilometres! This is about the same distance the Earth is from Jupiter!

• The energy in the sunlight we see today started out from the core of the Sun 30,000 years ago — it spent most of this time passing through the dense atoms that make the sun and just eight minutes to reach us once it had left the Sun!

• Almost all of the heavier elements in your body (for example, calcium, iron, carbon) were made somewhere in supernovae
explosions!

• Saturn has such a low density that it would float if put in water!

• Some volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon ‘Io’ eject material at speeds of up to 1km per second! This is about 20 times faster than
the volcanoes here on Earth can manage it!

• The winds on Neptune reach at least 2,100km per hour and are capable of ripping buildings into shreds. Considering the strongest hurricanes, such as Hurricane Andrew, which only had winds exceeding 251km per hour, Neptune’s winds are
incredibly powerful. Scientists are not certain how the planet’s winds can be that fast, but some believe it is due to a
combination of frigid temperatures and Neptune’s atmosphere