- So once the Sun has eaten up the planets, it will then collapse. It will still weigh a huge amount, but it will be about the size of Earth. After this phase it will be called a white dwarf.
- Neptune was the first planet discovered through mathematics.
- One day on Neptune is the equivalent of 16 hours on Earth.
- The universe has no center and is constantly expanding (getting bigger) every second – making it impossible to reach the edge.
- The highest mountain known to man is on an asteroid called Vesta. Measuring a whopping 22km in height, it is three times as tall as Mount Everest!
- Almost all of ordinary matter (99.9999999% of it) is empty space. If you took out all of the space in our atoms, the entire human race (all 7 billion of us) would fit into the volume of a sugar cube.
- The Solar System is rather large to say the least, but believe it or not, the Sun makes up 99.86% of the Solar Systems mass. Yes, you did read right, that's unbelievable.
- Researchers calculate the age of the planet by testing the oldest rocks on the surface of Earth and meteorites that fall from the space.
- The Sun weighs an astounding 4,385,214,857,119,399,823,317,774,893,056 pounds (1,989,100,000,000,000,000,000 billion kilograms), which is 333,060 times the weight of the Earth.
- Want to know where the world's largest solar energy plant is? Well, it's in none other than the United States in the sunny state of California!
- Did you know that it takes less than 10 minutes for the light of the Sun to reach the Earth? That is seriously quick!
- There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth. That's at least a billion trillion!
- Winds in Saturn's upper atmosphere can reach up to 1,600 (500 meters) per second. The strongest known hurricane-force winds on Earth are only 360 feet (110 meters) per second.
- In 1789, the newly discovered radioactive element uranium was named after Uranus, 8 years after its own discovery.
- Many, many years ago, people believed that the Earth didn't move and that the Sun rotated round the Earth. The first person to ever suggest that the Earth and other planets moved around the Sun was Aristarchus of Samos, more than 2,000 years ago.
- Saturn has 53 known moons, and 29 moons still awaiting their official confirmation.
- Uranus is blue due to high concentrations of methane in its atmosphere which absorbs the Sun's red light and reflects blue light back into space.
- Short-period comets take less than 200 years to orbit the sun and originate in the Kuiper Belt.
- In 2011 Neptune completed the first orbit of the Sun since its discovery 165 years before in 1846.
- The famous Hubble Space Telescope can never be used to investigate Mercury as the planet is so close to the sun that the sun's light could destroy the telescopes mechanism.