Dawnie+Space+Facts

Amazing Facts ﻿ from Stephen Hawking and many other famous astromers __//**Saturn: **//__
 * ﻿ It takes Saturn 29.46 Earth-years to circle around the Sun.
 * Saturn is the sixth closest planet to the sun
 * The average distance to the Sun is 1,430 million km
 * Diameter at equator: 120,536 kmcorresponding to 9.449 diameters at equator on Earth.
 * Surface Area is 83.7 x Earths surface area
 * Volume is 763.59 x Earths volume
 * Mass is 95 x Earths mass

Saturn's structure is a hot, rocky core that is surrounded by a liquid metal layer which itself is surrounded by a liquid hydrogen and helium layer. There then is an atmosphere that surrounds it all. On Saturn, winds have been recorded at speeds up to 1,795 km/h in Saturn's atmosphere. If you compare it with Earth, the strongest wind ever recorded is 371.68 km/hr! This wind was at Mount Washington, New Hampshire, USA, in April 12 1934.it is believed that wind speeds can sometimes reach over 480 km/h. However these are still very slow in comparison with Saturn.

So far, Saturn has 59 confirmed moons. 7 are round. Titan, the largest, is the only known moon within the Solar System to have an atmosphere. In volume, Titan is more than 3 times larger than our moon! __//**Mars **//__
 * Mars is the 4th closest planet to the Sun.
 * Average distance from the Sun is 227.9 million km
 * <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Diameter at equator is 6,805 km
 * <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">The average temperature on Mars is VERY cold: Around -60 degrees C (-76 F)

<span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Mars is a rocky planet with an iron core. In between its core and it's red crust, there's a very thin rocky layer. Mars also has a very thin atmosphere, mostly made of Carbon Dioxide.<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> (95.3 <span style="display: block; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">%) <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">But we, as humans cannot breathe Carbon Dioxide, which is very likely the reason there is no life on Mars. Since Mars has an atmosphere, we can talk about Martian Weather. It very much resembles what the weatherwould be like on a very cold desert-covered Earth. Sandstorms are common and huge cyclonic storms of water-ice clouds measuring more than 10 times the size of the United Kingdom have been observed. Imagine that!

<span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">The largest volcanoes in the Solar System are on the Surface of Mars. The largest one of all is called Olympus Mons. From one side to the other, it spreads over a disc-shaped area 648 km wide and is 24 km high. On Earth, the largest volcano is on Hawaii. It's called Mauna Loa and reaches only 4.1 km in height above the sea level. But if you measure it from where its base starts at the bottom of the ocean, it rises 17 high. Even so, this volcano still has 7 km to be as large as Olympus Mons!

<span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;"><span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Mars is believed to have once been at the right temperature for liquid water to flow on its surface and carve the channels we can now see on it's surface. Today, the only confirmed water pesence there is in the ice caps at the poles where ice water is mixed with solid carbon dioxide. However in December 2006, scientists looking at pictures of newly formed gullies on the Martian surface suggested a striking possibly: liquid water may still be present on Mars, buried deep down under its surface. <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace; font-size: 110%;">__//**The Sun:**//__


 * <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">The Sun is a great ball of very hot gasses, mainly hydrogen
 * <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">The Sun is nearly 150 km distance from Earth
 * <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">The Sun is 1, 400, 000 km in diameter - more than 100 times bigger than Earth
 * <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">The SURFACE temperature is around 5,500 Degrees Celsius
 * <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">The core is estimated 15,000,000 Degrees Celsius
 * <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Using a telescope, you can see sunspots from Earth. They are about 1,000 Degrees cooler than the Sun's surface.

<span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">To us on Earth, the Sun is one of the most important body in the heavens. It sends light and heat. Without the Sun's light, plants could not grow. Then there would be no food for us and all the other living things. And without heat, we simply would not be here since we would freeze to death. So without the Sun, Earth would be a dark, cold and dead world. The Sun and Earth travel together through space. Earth is one of the bodies that travel through space. Together, these bodies form the Solar System, the Sun's family. The word 'Solar' comes from the Latin word 'Sol' meaning the Sun. Like other stars, the Sun is a huge ball of extremely hot, glowing gas. It's surface is stormy and always changing. Great fiery furnaces suddenly spring up. Dark spots come and go. Streams of particles flow out into space like a wind, causing spectacular effects when they reach the Earth. Astromers think that the Sun is 4.6 billion years old. They believe it will keep on shining for another 5 billion years. <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;"> <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">

<span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Surface Temperature:

<span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Average Temperature on Earth's surface: 15 Degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit) <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth: -89 Degrees C (-128.2 F) Vostok, Antarctica, 21 July 1983 <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Highest temperature ever recorded on Earth: 58 Degrees C (136.4 F) Aziziyah, Libya, 13 September 1922

<span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Temperature on the Surface of the Moon: <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Daytime Average: 110 Degrees C (230 F) <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Nighttime Average: -150 Degrees C (-240 F)

<span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Average Temperature on the SURFACE of the Sun: 5,500 Degrees C (9,932 F) <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Average Temperature at the CORE of the Sun: 15,000,000 Degrees C (27,000,000 F)

<span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Average Temperature in Space: -270.4 Degrees C (-454.72 F) <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;"> __//**Jupiter**//__


 * <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Jupiter is the 5th closest planet to the sun.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Average distance to the Sun: 778.3 million km
 * <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Diameter at equator: 142,984 km
 * <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">It takes Jupiter 11.86 Earth years to circle the Sun
 * <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">So far, Jupitor has 63 confirmed moons. 4 are big emough to be round and were discovered by the Italian scientist Galilei Galileo in 1610. They are Lo, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. They are about the same size as our moon.

<span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">The Great Red Spot on Jupiter's surface is a great hurricane-type storm, a hurricane that has lasted for more than 3 centuries (first observed in 1655) but it may have been longer. The Great Red Spot storm is HUGE: more than twice the size of the Earth! Winds of Jupiter often reach 1,000 km per hr!

<span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">__**Light And Stars**__

<span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Everything in our Universe takes time to travel, even light. **In Space, light always travels at the maximum speed that's possible: 186,000 miles per second, or 300,000 km per second**. This speed in called the speed of light. It only takes light about 1.3 seconds to travel from Earth to the moon! Our Sun is further away from us than our moon is. When light leaves the Sun, it takes about 8 minutes and 30 seconds.to reach us on Earth. <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">The other stars in the sky are much, much further away from Earth than the Sun. The closest one after the Sun is called Proxima Centauri and it takes 4.22 years for light to from it to reach the Earth. All the other stars are further away. The light of almost all of the stars we see in the Night Sky has been traveling for hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of years before reaching our eyes. Even though we see them, some of these stars do not exist anymore. We do not know it yet because the light of their explosion when they die has to tet reach to us. ( A star is formed when gas, dust and a few more elements whirl together, join, compress, and form larger. As they compress and form larger, heat builds up. This heat then produces light. Then after a period of time, the star will become too strong and explode. That is called the death of a star. You will know when the star dies when it explodes into masses of light and dust, which then will gradually form another star.) <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;"> <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Mass is often measured by weighing the body, but mass and weight is not the same. You weigh slightly less on the top of a mountain because you are further from the cetre of the Earth. Because the mass of the moon is much less than the mass of the Earth, an astronaut who weighs about 90 kilograms on Earth would only weigh 15 kilograms on the moon. Therefore, every 6 kilos on the Earth is equal to 1 kilo on the moon. Einstein, a german physicist, who was born in 1879, discovered that energy is equivalent to mass according to the famous equation: E = mc2. E is energy, m is mass and c is the speed of light. Because the speed of light is very large, Einstein and others realized that this equation suggested that one could make an atom bomb. <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;"> <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">Book Source: __//George's Secret Key to the Universe//__ by Lucy and Stephen Hawking, Published in 2007, Great Britain <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">ISBN: 978-0-385-61270-8 <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">__//The Sun//__ by Robin Kerrod, Published in 2000 , Singapore <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">ISBN: 0-8225-3901-2