16 Interesting Facts About Our Solar System

 16 Interesting Facts About Our Solar System

While the universe is a big place to study, we shouldn’t forget our own backyard. With eight planets and a wealth of smaller worlds to look at, there’s more than enough to learn for a few lifetimes!

So what are some of the most surprising things about the planets? We’ve highlighted a few things below.

1. Mercury is hot, but not too hot for ice.

The closest planet to the Sun does indeed have ice on its surface. That sounds surprising at first glance, but the ice is found in permanently shadowed craters — those that never receive any sunlight. It is thought that perhaps comets delivered this ice to Mercury in the first place. In fact, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft not only found ice at the north pole, but it also found organics, which are the building blocks for life. Mercury is way too hot and airless for life as we know it, but it shows how these elements are distributed across the Solar System.

2. Venus doesn’t have any moons, and we aren’t sure why.

Both Mercury and Venus have no moons, which can be considered a surprise given there are dozens of other ones around the Solar System. Saturn has over 60, for example. And some moons are little more than captured asteroids, which may have been what happened with Mars’ two moons, for example. So what makes these planets different? No one is really sure why Venus doesn’t, but there is at least one stream of research that suggests it could have had one in the past.

Mars, as it appears today, Credit: NASA

3. Mars had a thicker atmosphere in the past.

What a bunch of contrasts in the inner Solar System: practically atmosphere-less Mercury, a runaway hothouse greenhouse effect happening in Venus’ thick atmosphere, temperate conditions on much of Earth and then a thin atmosphere on Mars. But look at the planet and you can see gullies carved in the past from probable water. Water requires more atmosphere, so Mars had more in the past. Where did it go? Some scientists believe it’s because the Sun’s energy pushed the lighter molecules out of Mars’ atmosphere over millions of years, decreasing the thickness over time.

4. Jupiter is a great comet catcher.

The most massive planet in the Solar System probably had a huge influence on its history. At 318 times the mass of Earth, you can imagine that any passing asteroid or comet going near Jupiter has a big chance of being caught or diverted. Maybe Jupiter was partly to blame for the great bombardment of small bodies that peppered our young Solar System early in its history, causing scars you can still see on the Moon today. And in 1994, astronomers worldwide were treated to a rare sight: a comet, Shoemaker-Levy 9, breaking up under Jupiter’s gravity and slamming into the atmosphere.

Fragmentation of comets is common. Many sungrazers are broken up by thermal and tidal stresses during their perihelions. At top, an image of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (May 1994) after a close approach with Jupiter which tore the comet into numerous fragments. An image taken by Andrew Catsaitis of components B and C of Comet 73P/Schwassmann–Wachmann 3 as seen together on 31 May 2006 (Credit: NASA/HST, Wikipedia, A.Catsaitis)

5. No one knows how old Saturn’s rings are

There’s a field of ice and rock debris circling Saturn that from afar, appear as rings. Early telescope observations of the planet in the 1600s caused some confusion: does that planet have ears, or moons, or what? With better resolution, however, it soon became clear that there was a chain of small bodies encircling the gas giant. It’s possible that a single moon tore apart under Saturn’s strong gravity and produced the rings. Or, maybe they’ve been around (pun intended) for the last few billion years, unable to coalesce into a larger body but resistant enough to gravity not to break up.

6. Uranus is more stormy than we thought.

When Voyager 2 flew by the planet in the 1980s, scientists saw a mostly featureless blue ball and some assumed there wasn’t much activity going on on Uranus. We’ve had a better look at the data since then that does show some interesting movement in the southern hemisphere. Additionally, the planet drew closer to the Sun in 2007, and in more recent years telescope probing has shown some storms going on. What is causing all this activity is difficult to say unless we were to send another probe that way. And unfortunately, there are no missions yet that are slated for sure to zoom out to that part of the Solar System.

Infrared images of Uranus showing storms at 1.6 and 2.2 microns obtained Aug. 6, 2014 by the 10-meter Keck telescope. Credit: Imke de Pater (UC Berkeley) & Keck Observatory images.

7. Neptune has supersonic winds.

While on Earth we are concerned about hurricanes, the strength of these storms is nowhere near what you would find on Neptune. At its highest altitudes, according to NASA, winds blow at more than 1,100 miles per hour (1,770 kilometers per hour). To put that in context, that’s faster than the speed of sound on Earth, at sea level. Why Neptune is so blustery is a mystery, especially considering the Sun’s heat is so little at its distance.

8. You can see Earth’s magnetic field at work during light shows.

We have a magnetic field surrounding our planet that protects us from the blasts of radiation and particles the Sun sends our way. Good thing, too, because such flare-ups could prove deadly to unprotected people; that’s why NASA keeps an eye on solar activity for astronauts on the International Space Station, for example. At any rate, when you see auroras shining in the sky, that’s what happens when the particles from the Sun flow along the magnetic field lines and interact with Earth’s upper atmosphere.

Universe Today has many articles on interesting facts about the planets. Start with 10 facts about Mercury  and 10 facts about Venus. You may also want to check out the 10 facts about Mars. Astronomy Cast also has a number of podcasts about the planets, including one on Earth.

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While most of us are stuck on planet Earth, we’re lucky enough to have a fairly transparent atmosphere. This allows us to look up at the sky and observe changes. The ancients noticed planets wandering across the sky, and occasional visitors such as comets.

Thousands of years ago, most thought the stars ruled our destiny. Today, however, we can see science at work in the planets, asteroids and comets close to home. So why take a look at the Solar System? What can it teach us?

9. The definition of a planet and a moon is fuzzy.

We all know of that famous International Astronomical Union vote in 2006 where Pluto was demoted from planethood into a newly created class called “dwarf planets.” But the definition drew controversy among some, who pointed out that no planet — dwarf or otherwise — perfectly clears the neighborhood in its orbit of asteroids, for example. Moons are considered to orbit around planets, but that doesn’t cover situations such as moons orbiting asteroids or double planets, for example. Goes to show you the Solar System requires more study to figure this out.

10. Comets and asteroids are leftovers.

No, we don’t mean leftovers to eat — we mean leftovers of what the Solar System used to look like. So while it’s easy to get distracted by the weather and craters and prospects for life on planets and moons, it’s important to remember that we must also pay attention to the smaller bodies. Comets and asteroids, for example, could have brought organics and water ice to our own planet — providing what we need for life.

Four images of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko taken on Nov. 30, 2014 by the orbiting Rosetta spacecraft. Credit: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM – CC BY-SA IGO 3.0

11. The planets are all on the same “plane” and orbit in the same direction.

When considering the IAU’s definition of planets, we come up with eight: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. You’ll notice that these bodies tend to follow the same path in the sky (called the ecliptic) and that they orbit the Sun in the same direction. That supports the leading theory for the Solar System’s formation, which is that the planets and moons and Sun formed from a large gas and dust cloud that condensed and spun.

12. We’re nowhere near the center of the galaxy.

We can measure vast distances across the universe by looking at things such as “standard candles” —  a type of exploding stars that tend to have the same luminosity, which makes it easier to predict how far away they are from us. At any rate, looking at our neighborhood, we’ve been able to figure out we’re nowhere near the Milky Way galaxy’s center. We’re about 165 quadrillion miles away from the center supermassive black hole, NASA says, which is probably a good thing.

A still photo from an animated flythrough of the universe using SDSS data. This image shows our Milky Way Galaxy. The galaxy shape is an artist’s conception, and each of the small white dots is one of the hundreds of thousands of stars as seen by the SDSS. Image credit:
Dana Berry / SkyWorks Digital, Inc. and Jonathan Bird (Vanderbilt University)

13. But the Solar System is bigger than you think.

Beyond the orbit of Neptune (the furthermost planet), it takes a long time to leave the Solar System. In 2012, some 35 years after leaving Earth on a one-way trip to the outer solar Solar System, Voyager 1 passed through the area where the Sun’s magnetic and gas environment gives way to that of the stars, meaning that it is interstellar space. That was an astounding 11 billion miles (17 billion kilometers) away from Earth, or roughly 118 equivalent Earth-sun distances (astronomical units).

14. The Sun is hugely massive.

Just how massive? 99.86% of the Solar System’s mass is in our local star, which goes to show you where the real heavyweight is. The Sun is made up of hydrogen and helium, which shows you that these gases are far more abundant in our neighborhood (and the Universe generally) than the rocks and metals we are more familiar with here on Earth.

Solar prominences and filaments on the Sun on September 18, 2014, as seen with a hydrogen alpha filter. Credit and copyright: John Chumack/Galactic Images.

15. We haven’t finished searching for life here.

So we know for sure that life exists on Earth, but that doesn’t rule out a whole bunch of other places. Mars had water flowing on it in the ancient past, and has frozen water at its poles — making astrobiologists think it might be a good candidate. There also are a range of icy moons that could have oceans with life below the surfaces, such as Europa (at Jupiter) and Enceladus (at Saturn). There’s also the interesting world of Titan, which has “prebiotic chemistry” — chemistry that was a precursor to life — on its surface.

16. We can use the Solar System to better understand exoplanets.

Exoplanets are so far away, and so small in our telescopes, that it’s difficult to see very much detail in their atmospheres. But by looking at the chemistry of Jupiter, for example, we can make some predictions about gas giants further afield. If we look at Earth and Neptune, we can get a better sense of the range of planetary sizes on which life could exist (those “super-Earths” and “mini-Neptunes” you sometimes hear mentioned.) And even looking at where water freezes in our own Solar System can help us better understand the ice line in other locations.

Note: Regards to respective image owners.