Curiosities of the Solar System

The human need to explore and transport the imagination to the most mysterious places has been a recurring practice since time immemorial. Investigating the wonders of the solar system is a journey that many dare to undertake. While it is true that the technology we have today can take us beyond the limits of the planet, that does not represent a barrier to question the existence of life itself. There are numerous curiosities of the solar system that are worth knowing.

In this article we are going to tell you which are the main curiosities of the solar system that attract the most attention.

Composition of the solar system

Planets vary widely in size. Jupiter alone contains more than twice as much material as all the other planets combined. Our solar system arises from the attraction of elements in clouds that contain all the chemical elements that we know of from the periodic table. The attraction was so strong that finally collapsed and all the material expanded. Hydrogen atoms fuse into helium atoms through nuclear fusion. Thus the sun was formed.

So far we have discovered eight planets and the sun: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. There are two types of planets: inner or terrestrial and outer or gaseous. Mercury, Venus, Mars and Earth are terrestrial. They are closer to the sun and are solid. The rest, on the other hand, are considered planets further from the sun and are considered "gas giants".

Regarding the situation of the planets, it can be said that they rotate in the same plane. However, dwarf planets rotate with a high tilt. The plane in which our planet and other planets orbit is called the ecliptic plane. Also, all the planets revolve around the sun in the same direction, while comets like Halley's Comet revolve in the opposite direction.

curiosities of the solar system

• The sun is our dominant star, and it's so big that you might even be surprised to find that represents more than 99% of the current mass of the solar system. Even adding the masses of all the planets together does not equal the size of the sun.
• Despite the size of the sun, and the fact that the solar system consists not only of the 8 known planets, but also of asteroids and cosmic objects, they do not amount to much space in it. The sum of their masses is too small compared to the vacuum that exists between each element of the system.
• According to NASA, the solar system is 4.500 billion years old. It forms from a dense cloud of gas and stardust. The data suggests that the cloud is likely to collapse due to shock waves from a nearby supernova. Gravity played a fundamental role in the formation of our home.
• The solar system itself already represents a large void, but our group of planets harbors another larger void, the Milky Way. It rotates around its center at about 828.000 kilometers per hour and is one of the spiral arms known as the Orion or Local Arm.
• The sun is the largest object in the planetary group, followed by Jupiter, which is 318 times more massive than Earth and 2,5 times more massive than all the other planets combined.
• Like Earth and all the planets, the solar system has its own protective magnetic field. It is formed by ions in the sun's atmosphere that travel in the solar wind and extend beyond the orbit of Pluto. The result is a protective bubble that surrounds the entire solar system.
• The human being has always questioned where the edges of the solar system are. It was discovered that it is the last gravitational barrier that supports the Sun, known like the Oort Cloud. It is made up of trillions of other celestial bodies, such as asteroids, comets, etc. You can learn more about it in our article on the Oort cloud and its boundaries.
• Our system has more than 150 satellites, the planet with the most satellites is Saturn, which currently has 81 satellites, surpassing the current 79 of Jupiter.
• With an average temperature of around 450°C, Venus is the hottest planet in the entire solar system. To learn more about this planet, you can check out our article on the colors of the planets of the solar system.
• Water ice exists throughout the solar system, contrary to previous thought. We now know that ice exists on Mars, the Moon, and other celestial bodies such as Jupiter's moon Europa and the asteroid Ceres.
• Among the curiosities of the solar system, we find that Jupiter takes 1.433 Earth days to complete its return to the sun, while Jupiter's day only lasts 10 hours.
• Unsurprisingly for a nearby massive planet, Jupiter has the largest magnetosphere of all the planets, even larger than the sun. This is the magnetic layer responsible for deflecting the solar wind, and the stronger the magnetic field, the larger the magnetosphere. By context, Jupiter's magnetic field is 20.000 times stronger than Earth's.
• The composition of the planets in our system varies greatly, with the so-called terrestrial planets, which are mostly rocky and metallic. But there are also gas giants made up mostly of hydrogen and helium. Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars belong to the first group. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are all gas giants, also known as "ice giants."
• Titan is the moon of Saturn, but it is not just any moon, since it has unique characteristics in the entire solar system. According to astrophysicists, Flying on Titan would be much easier than on Earth, thanks to its low gravity and thick, low-pressure atmosphere, two elements necessary for flight.
• Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, there is a belt that stretches at least 500 million kilometers thick, where asteroids are densely distributed. It is estimated that there are at least 960.000 objects of this type orbiting in the so-called asteroid belt. of the solar system. For more details, you can consult our article on the comets of the solar system.

I hope that with this information you can learn more about the curiosities of the solar system and the result of what the advancement of science shows.