Uranus’ blue glow is due to the gases in its atmosphere.
Uranus’ atmosphere is made up of hydrogen, helium and methane. The methane in Uranus’ upper atmosphere filters out all the red light from the Sun but reflects the Sun’s blue light back into space, giving it its blue appearance.
In our solar system that are 4 planets known as gas giants: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus & Neptune.
A gas giant is a large planet that is made up mostly gases like hydrogen and helium, and has only a relatively small rocky core.
Uranus has 27 moons that have been discovered so far.
It has 5 large moons, and 22 small moons. Titania is the largest of Uranus’ moons and is the eighth largest moon in our solar system with an average diameter of 980.5 miles (1,578 kilometers).
Because of its unique tilt, a season on Uranus is equivalent to 21 Earth years.
Also the 97.77 degrees tilt on Uranus’ axis means that a day there only last 17 hours, 14 minutes and 24 seconds.
Neptune’s moon, Triton, orbits the planet backwards.
Triton is the only large moon of any of the planets that does this. This is known as a retrograde orbit and astronomers are unsure as to why Triton orbits Neptune this way.
Triton is gradually getting closer to the planet it orbits.
Scientists believe that when Triton eventually gets too close to Neptune, it will be torn apart by the planet’s gravity and could potentially create another ring around Neptune – giving it more rings than Saturn.
There are more stars in space than there are grains of sand in the world.
There are 10 times more stars in the night sky than grains of sand on the Earth, with 70 sextillion stars being visible from Earth through a telescope. To put that in numbers, 70 sextillion is this: 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Neptune takes nearly 165 Earth years to make one orbit of the Sun.
That’s equivalent to 60,190 Earth days to orbit the sun once! Neptune has a very slow orbital speed of 3.37 miles per second (5.43 km/s). This means that since it was discovered in 1846, it has only completed just one orbit!
Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, is half the size of Pluto.
The same surfaces of Charon and Pluto always face each other, which is known as mutual tidal locking.
The International Space Station is the largest manned object ever sent into space.
At 119 yards (109 meters) long, the International Space Station (ISS) sits roughly 250 miles (400 km) above the Earth and is the third-brightest object in the night sky.
A day on Pluto is lasts for 153.6 hours long.
This equates to 6 days 9 hours and 36 minutes. A day on Pluto lasts so long because of its slow rotation rate.
Saturn is the second largest planet in our solar system.
It has a radius of 36,184 miles (58,232 km) – nine times that of Earth. However, due to its low density it only has a weight roughly one-eighth of Earth.
Any free-moving liquid in outer space will form itself into a sphere.
This is because of something called surface tension, which is an imbalance of intermolecular attractive forces. This can also occur in low Earth orbit.
Mercury, Venus, Earth & Mars are known as the “Inner Planets”.
They are named the Inner Planets because they orbit closest to the Sun. An inner planet is classified as a planet located within the asteroid belt.
We know more about Mars and our Moon than we do about our oceans.
We have fully mapped 100% of the surface of Mars and Earth’s Moon, whereas we have only been able to map roughly 5% of the ocean floor.
If you were driving at 75 miles per hour, it would take 258 days to drive around Saturn’s rings.
Saturn’s rings are roughly 175,000 miles long, although they are only about 3,200 feet thick.
Only 5% of the universe is visible from Earth.
68% of the universe is dark energy and 27% is dark matter. Both of these are invisible, even with a telescope, which means we are only able to see 5% of the universe.
Light travels from the Sun to the Earth in less than 10 minutes.
The Photons emitted from the Sun’s surface travel across the vacuum of space at the speed of light to reach our eyes in only 8 minutes and 20 seconds.
The Earth’s rotation is slowing slightly as time goes on.
This means that days were shorter in the past. This is because of the tidal effects the Moon has on the Earth’s rotation.
There are more volcanoes on Venus than any other planet in our solar system.
There are more than 1,600 major volcanoes across the surface of Venus, including a 5 mile (8 km) high volcano called Maat Mons. However, none of these volcanoes are known to be erupting at present and most are probably long extinct.
SOURCE: NASA.gov
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