Ten tons of space dust falls on the Earth every day.
Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.
The Earth's surface temperature has increased by almost 0.7°C since the beginning of this century. The 10 warmest years since the mid-1800's, when people began keeping records, have all occurred since 1983.
Fastest anything -- Light is thought to be the fastest thing in the universe. It travels 186,000 miles each second. Still it takes about eight minutes for sunlight to travel from the sun to the earth.
Whole lotta ice -- If all the ice in Antartica melted the level of the oceans would rise 200 feet. About one fourth of the land area of the world would be flooded.
When people first looked through telescopes at the Moon, they thought that the dark areas on the moon were seas. They gave them names, such as the Sea of Tranquility. It was later discovered that these seas were really areas of dry, dark lava from volcanic eruptions.
Saturn's atmosphere is made up of different gases. Some of these gases do not mix and when Saturn spin, high winds blow the gas around the planet into strips. Each strip is a different kind of gas.
Mars is red because it is rusty ! The surface of the planet is covered in iron oxide, or rust, which forms when iron mixes with small amounts of oxygen & water.
The sun is so hot that spacecrafts can not fly very near it. In 1976, Helios 2 travelled to within 45,000,000 km of the sun. This is closer than the Sun's nearest planet, mercury.
The Sun will last for many millions of years. In about 5 billion years time, the sun will have to burnt up all of its hydrogen fuel. It will become a hundred times as bright as it is now and swell up to swallow the nearest planets, including earth. After another 100 million years, the Sun will shrink to become a White Dwarf Star.
So far, six tiny planets have been found. The first two have been named Smiley and Kamla. Scientists once hoped that a large planet would be discovered, but now it seems unlikely.
Our Solar System was formed about 4.6 billion years ago. Nearby, 10 billion years after the universe began. New stars in solar system are still being formed.
Earth is the most highly coloured object in the Solar System. From space it appears as a blue and white planet because of the blue of the oceans and the white of the clouds.
Earth is a very special planet. It is the only planet in the Solar System known to support life. If it were closer to the Sun, it would be too hot to support lift. Farther away, it would be too cold.
The Moon has no atmosphere and no water, so nothing will grow. But when samples of Moon soil were brought back to Earth and watered, plants grew in Moon soil.