Here are 25 Amazing Facts About Planets.
1-5 Amazing Facts About Planets
1. Astronomers have discovered a planet where it rains glass (silicate) sideways, in howling 7,000km-per-hour winds. This gives the planet a blue hue. It is 63 light-years from us. – Source
2. NASA has discovered a “waterworld” planet 40 light-years away that may contain exotic materials such as “hot ice” and “superfluid water.” – Source
3. 51 Pegasi B is a gas giant located 440 light years away from us which has temperatures reaching 1000 to 2000°C. Due to such high temperatures, it rains iron there. – Source
4. Jupiter is shrinking at the rate of about 2 cm each year because the planet radiates more heat than it receives from the Sun. – Source
5. Scientists have estimated that there are nearly 2 billion earth-like planets in the Milky Way alone. – Source
6-10 Amazing Facts About Planets
6. There are rogue planets floating through space completely alone, not orbiting any stars. It is also possible that some of these pitch-black planets might support life. – Source
7. Uranus is actually the only planet that rotates sideways and kind of “rolls” around the sun rather than “spinning” like any other planet in our solar system. – Source
8. It rains diamonds on gaseous planets like Neptune and Uranus. They contain methane that at high pressures and temperatures turn into diamonds which then fall to the center of the planet. – Source
9. Scientists have discovered a Neptune sized planet (GLIESE 436 B) that is fifteen times closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun. It is full of water, but due to its massive gravity, water is densely packed together pulled towards the core much like ice with temperatures reaching 439 degree Celsius. It is known as burning ice – Source
10. NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has discovered a giant planet the size of Jupiter 750 light years away that is blacker than coal. It is the darkest planet yet discovered by scientists. It reflects less than 1 percent of the sunlight falling on it. – Source
11-15 Amazing Facts About Planets
11. Neptune holds the record for the strongest winds in our solar system. Scientists have been puzzled at the discovery of wind speeds reaching 2,100 km/h on Neptune. – Source
12. The asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars is not the leftover debris of a destroyed planet as it was previously believed. It is in fact the remains of a planet that never formed due to Jupiter’s mass. – Source
13. The largest scale model of our solar system spans the length of Sweden. The Sun is represented by the largest hemispherical building (Ericsson Globe) in the world in Stockholm. – Source
14. Scientists have found that Jupiter’s massive gravity is perturbing mercury’s already eccentric orbit. They have arrived at four possible end results from this finding: : Mercury will crash into the Sun, Mercury will be ejected from the solar system altogether, Mercury will crash into Venus, or Mercury will crash into Earth in the next 5-7 billion years.- Source
15. Saturn’s moon, Titan, is the only body in our solar system beyond Earth that is known to have liquid on its surface. – Source
16-20 Amazing Facts About Planets
16. In 2012, Planet Hunter volunteers found a Neptune sized planet thousand of light years away that orbits four stars – Source
17. Some scientists believe that around 4 billion years ago Neptune and Uranus may have switched their places in the solar system. – Source
18. Jupiter is the fastest spinning planet in our solar system. Due to the intensity of its rotation the planet is flat at the poles and bulges at the equator. It takes less than 10 hours for it to complete a rotation on its axis. – Source
19. In 2011, scientists discovered a star that they later nicknamed Tatooine (from Star War) that orbits a binary star system (a system of two stars that revolve around each other under their mutual gravitation). – Source
20. On Mars, a dust storm can develop in a matter of hours and can envelope the entire planet within a few days. They are the largest and most violent dust storms in our solar system. – Source
21-25 Amazing Facts About Planets
21. In 2012, scientists discovered an exoplanet that was roughly two times the size of earth, that has a crust made of diamond 2500 miles thick – Source
22. Technically, our planet is inside the Sun’s atmosphere – Source
23. There is an exoplanet called COROT-7b where it rains rocks. Its surface temperature is hot enough to vaporize rock pebbles, condense out of the air and rain down. – Source
24. The planet Venus does not have any tilt, so consequently it has no seasons and also it is the only planet in our solar system that rotates clock-wise. – Source
25. Our moon is bigger than Pluto and some scientists think it’s more of a planet in a “double planet” Earth-moon system. – Source
26-30 Amazing Facts About Planets
26. James Webb Space Telescope which is to be launched in 2018 will be able to directly image “Earth-like” planets. – Source
27. Scientists believe that if all of the ice on the polar caps of Mars were to be melted, it would cover the entire planet with water to a height of an 30 meters, – Source
28. The orbits of all the planets of our solar system were within the same 90° arc of the solar system on February 1, 949, and that the next time it is this will occur is on May 6, 2492. – Source
29. If Ganymede wasn’t Jupiter’s moon, it would have be considered a planet because its larger than Mercury. – Source
30. From the time Pluto was labeled as a planet, and then demoted to a dwarf planet status(76 years), it never even completed a full rotation around the sun. – Source
