Some Fascinating Facts About Our Planet
June 30, 2008 10:20 am solar system, the sunLife on Earth is estimated to have first evolved some 3.8 billion years ago but human civilization is only about 6000 years old. The dinosaurs ruled the earth for about 160 million years (160,000,000), over 26,000 times longer. Lets all hope we make it that long.
Earth is estimated to weigh 6,585,600,000,000,000,000,000 tons and has a surface area of 200 million square miles of which 70% is sea water. There is so much sea water that the average depth of the ocean is 2 miles. The highest point is Mt. Everest (the one people keep killing themselves trying to climb, and the lowest point is the Dead Sea, the Sea that is so salty that you float and really cannot drown in unless you tried very hard because you can pretty much just sit in the water without sinking.
Space is a vacuum so no sound is heard, those loud space explosions only exist in the movies.
Our Sun is so massive that it burns (converts to helium) 700 million tons of hydrogen a second. If you figure a car weights about 2 tons, thats 350 million Chevy’s worth every second. It has so much hydrogen that it has done this for 4 billion years and will have enough to go for a few billion more… thats a lot of gas.
1.7 Billion years ago the oceans were red with rust and not blue.
Even though we feel like we are standing still, we are actually moving very fast. The Earth is moving so fast that if we could drive so fast, we could go all the way around in 7 minutes. (66,700 MPH)
Mercury is the planet closest to our Sun, but not the hottest, Venus is because its atmosphere has a greenhouse effect that keeps the heat in.
On Mercury the sky is always dark and the sun appears twice as large as here. no matter if its day or night, you could always see billions of stars in the dark sky. Also, a year on Mercury is only 88 days long, but a full day (from sunset to sunrise) takes 176 days. That would make for one long school day. Mercury is also a small planet only a little bigger than the moon.
Jupiter is the largest planet with a mass 318 time that of Earth. The huge mass makes the interior of Jupiter 100 million times that of Earth’s surface pressure. That means it would most likely squish anything that went there. Jupiter has 16 known moons and the giant red spot is actually a large storm the size of our planet that has been going on for maybe as long as a few hundred years. Now thats a long stretch of bad weather .
Fascinating Pictures of our Sun - Click Here
Fascinating Pictures of our Solar System and planets - Click Here
