Pluto

Pluto was named by an 11 year old girl after the roman god of the underworld in 1930. It is classified as a dwarf planet. Puto has 5 moons, the biggest being charon. It is so big that it and pluto orbit each other. Unlike the other planets, Pluto’s orbit is tilted and oval-shaped. Pluto […]

Neptune

Neptune is an ice giant, named after the roman god of the sea. It has 14 known moons named after other sea gods and nymphs. Neptune has 5 main rings and 4 other ring arcs made of dust and debris. Its atosphere is composed of hydrogen, helium, and methane. Beneath the atmosphere is an ocean […]

Uranus

Yes, the jokes are plentiful, but uranus is actually a very interesting planet. It is unique in that it rotates on its side at an almost 90 degree angle. Its weird angle causes it to have very different seasons. The north pole gets 21 years of night in winter, 21 years of day in summer, […]

Saturn

Saturn is the 6th planet in the solar system. It’s days are 10.7 hours long, the second shortest of the planets, and the years are 29 earth years long. It is made of mostly hydrogen and helium, like jupiter. Saturn has a dense core of iron and nickel surrounded by a rocky material. Despite it’s […]

Jupiter

Jupiter is the biggest planet in our solar system. In fact, it is so big that all of the other 7 planets could fit inside of it. It is 143,000 kilometers wide. Jupiter is a type of planet called a gas giant and it is made up of mostly hydrogen and helium. The pressure of […]

Mars

Mars is a rocky red planet named after the god of war for its blood resembling color. Mars is actually red because the iron oxidide in the soil. Mars has two moons, phobos and deimos, which means fear and fight. Mars is about 142 million miles from the sun. The planet is really cold, it’s […]

Venus

Venus is a rocky, volcanic planet with a thick atmosphere. It is approximentaly 67 million miles from the sun, about 3/4 the ditance to the sun from the earth. It has extreme temperatures that can get up to 864 degrees Fahernheit. It spins in the opposite direction of most of the planets. A day on […]

Mercury

Mercury is the smallest planet in the solar system as well as the closest to the sun. It was named after the Roman messenger god. Its diameter is 3,000, less than half of earth’s. Mercury is very hot during the day, but can get hundreds of degrees below freezing at night. A day on mercury […]

Black Holes

Black holes are the most dense points in space. They are so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape. Black holes are created when a big star gets so big and dense, that it collapses in on itself. There are the supermassive black holes which are at the center of each galaxy. However, small […]

The Sun

The sun is a yellow dwarf star made out of hydrogen and helium. It is about 109 times the mass of the earth with a diameter of 864,000 miles. The length of its rotation is 27 days, and at the poles it is around 36 days. The mass of the sun is 99.8% of the […]