1

Our Solar System is made up of the sun, planets, dwarf planets, moons, and other objects zooming around in space such as asteroids and comets.

2

Our Solar System has eight planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

3

The Sun is over 300,000 times bigger than the Earth and is made up of three quarters hydrogen and helium.

4

If you lined up all of the planets in our Solar System they would fit in between the Moon and the Earth.

5

Comets are made up of sand, ice, and carbon dioxide, and are basically leftover materials from the formation of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago. Halley’s Comet enters our inner solar system only once every 75 years. The last time it was visible from Earth was in 1986 and the next time will be in 2061.

6

In all these years of space travel humans have left a lot of trash floating around in Earth’s orbit. This is called “space junk” and it’s believed that there are 500,000 pieces of space junk in orbit today.

7

The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, located roughly between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. It contains a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies, of many sizes but much smaller than planets, called asteroids or minor planets.

8

There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth. That’s at least a billion trillion!

9

The sunset on Mars appears blue. And since mars has lower gravity than Earth. A person who weighs 100 kg on Earth would only weigh 38 kg on Mars.

10

Uranus is the only planet in our solar system that rotates on its side and Venus is the only planet in our solar system that spins backwards relative to the other planets.

11

Fun Fact

Neptune has shorter days. Its days are only 16 hours long.

12

Without any air to transmit sound, space is completely silent. Sound does not carry in space.

13

Saturn's rings are made from trillions of chunks of orbiting ice.

14

Neutron stars are some of the smallest and densest stars that we know of in the universe. They are created when the core of a star collapses after a supernova explosion.

15

Lightning storms on Jupiter and Saturn turn methane into carbon soot that falls and hardens into chunks of graphite and then diamonds. So it rains diamonds on Saturn and Jupiter and scientists think the largest of these are about 1 cm in diameter.

16

Fun Fact

Dwarf planet Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it's the only dwarf planet located in the inner solar system.