![]() Venus also has the most volcanoes in the Solar System. In fact, Venus is so hot that, when the Soviet Union landed probes there, the majority of them lasted less than an hour due to the combined effects of high pressure and extremely hot temperatures. This is due to the fact that its atmosphere is composed of mainly carbon dioxide with sulphuric acid clouds, leading to rampant global warming. Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system. ![]() Earth only has one satellite, the moon, and, in 1969, Purdue graduate Neil Armstrong became the first man to step foot on it. Earth is also the only planet with both plate tectonics and liquid water in the solar system. Mars also used to have water, many billions of years ago.Įarth, as far as science’s current knowledge is concerned, is the only location in the universe where life is one-hundred percent known to exist. Mars gets its characteristic red color from the rusting iron dust on its surface. However, that is not why Mars is so famous. Mars, our Red Planet neighbor, holds many records in the Solar System- Mars has the tallest mountain, the deepest basin, and the deepest canyon. Some asteroids do not reside between Mars and Jupiter, however- Eros and Itokawa are considered Near Earth asteroids because they are located inside Mars’ orbit. In the photo, each green dot represents an asteroid (though they are smaller than depicted by the dots). The Asteroid Belt is located between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars. Off-planet, on one of Jupiter’s many moons, there is a possibility of life within Europa’s subsurface ocean! Jupiter’s south pole also has cyclones whirling around, but none of them are as large as the Great Red Spot. Famous for its Great Red Spot, that particular cyclone has been alive for the past three hundred years. Jupiter is the largest planet in the Solar System and is one of the gas giants. The rings themselves, though, stretch about fifty-thousand miles from Saturn’s surface and are only roughly thirty feet thick. Some of these ice particles come from eruptions on one of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus. Saturn’s rings, however, are made of of billions of ice particles. ![]() Saturn is a gas giant this means that it has a small rocky core surrounded by gas. In fact, one of Neptune’s moons, Triton, orbits opposite the direction of Neptune’s own rotation, the only large moon in the Solar System to do so! Contrary to how the rest of the planets in the Solar System rotate, Uranus rotates on its side. The two planets farthest from the Sun, Uranus and Neptune, are both ice giants (they have icy mantles) with many moons- at least twenty-seven and fourteen, respectively. ![]() Pluto also has a terrain, made of tall mountains of water ice and plains of smooth nitrogen ice, along with other landforms. Though it be just a dwarf planet, Pluto has a moon! This moon is called Charon. Once a planet, Pluto is now classified as one of the hundreds of dwarf planets in the solar system. This area is the space beyond Neptune, and Pluto is a resident (though it will sometimes cross inside Neptune’s orbit every couple hundred years). The Kuiper Belt is the home to the dwarf planets and other icy bodies. Halley's Comet passes by Earth every 75 years. The famous tails comets sprout occur when a comet’s orbit brings it close to the sun, resulting in its consequential release of dust and gas. Many originating from the Oort Cloud, comets are defined as a loose group of dust, ice, and small rocky particles roughly the size of a small town. But how many Earth-like exoplanets are there? There are roughly 10^ 23 potentially habitable planets, and if only one planet in a billion actually produced life, there would be one trillion planets out there with living organisms. However, they can be detected when they cross in front of their parent star, thus dropping the observed brightness of that starby a small amount (Transit Method), or by the doppler spectroscopy (stars with exoplanets wobble due to the planets’ gravitational pull, shifting the star’s light spectrum). The Solar System Exoplanets are planets that orbit a star that is not the Sun, and they are very difficult to observe directly. EAPS Displays on the third floor of the HAMP building Third Floor ![]()
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