Light from the Sun which reflects on the moon takes about 1 minute to reach Earth. Light from the Sun itself takes about 8 minutes to reach Earth. Neptune is four light hours away. Mercury is 3 minutes. The oldest galaxy on record was created only 380 million years after the Big Bang, which happened 13.7 billion years ago. John Herschel was a pioneer of photography and was also an astronomer; he named seven moons of Saturn and four moons of Uranus. His father William made great advances to telescope technology and discovered Uranus. A day on Mars lasts about 24.7 hours. A Martian year is 687 Earth days. Mars has the highest mountain of all the planets. NASA and ESA want to land humans on Mars by the year 2035. Saturn has 62 moons. The largest one, Titan, is larger than Mercury. Saturns rings are 93% water-ice and are only about 65 feet (20 meters) in thickness. Saturn is the windiest planet in our Solar System with wind speeds in excess of 1000 mph (1600 km/h) Saturn is almost twice as far from the Sun as Jupiter. Earth is the densest planet in the Solar System. Mercury comes second. Jupiter is the third brightest object in the night sky after the Moon and Venus. The largest planet has no hard terrain; it is made up of only gases. If you could drive a car at 70mph it would take you between 4 to 5 months to get to the Moon. The element Plutonium was named after Pluto following the planet-name theme that started with Uranium. Despite Neptune being farther away, the coldest planet is Uranus. Academics prefer to pronounce Uranus as (ūr′·ə·nəs) (ˈjuɹənəs), placing the emphasis on the long U followed by a short E.
Posted on: Thu, 03 Apr 2014 01:41:53 +0000