Blog by KhushSidhu

 16 Interesting Facts About Our S olar 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....

Dark Matter (The Invisible World) The visible universe — including Earth, the sun, other stars, and galaxies — is made of protons, neutrons, and electrons bundled together into atoms. Perhaps one of the most surprising discoveries of the 20th century was that this ordinary, or baryonic, matter makes up less than 5 percent of the mass of the universe. The rest of the universe appears to be made of a mysterious, invisible substance called dark matter (25 percent) and a force that repels gravity known as dark energy (70 percent).   Unlocking the Mystery Scientists have not yet observed dark matter directly. It doesn't interact with baryonic matter and it's completely invisible to light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation, making dark matter impossible to detect with current instruments. But scientists are confident it exists because of the gravitational effects it appears to have on galaxies and galaxy clusters. For instance, according to...