The Hubble Telescope has photographed pictures of auroras on Jupiter and Saturn very much like those at our North and South Poles. But if we had auroras as big as these, they would cover the entire Earth and more.
If you were to place the planet Saturn in a big enough bowl of water, it would float!
Submitted by Mark-Robert
About 20 percent of the earth’s land is made up of desert, and the world’s largest desert is the Sahara of North Africa.
The planet Pluto is very cold, and reaches minus 400 degrees F.
Black Holes are disappearing! At first, it was believed that nothing could come out of a black hole and they would be around forever. But a famous physicist, named Stephen Hawkings, discovered that black holes lose energy and eventually evaporate away. But don’t wait around for one to "disappear" because it will take trillions and trillions of years to happen.
On a clear night, the human eye can see between 2,000 and 3,000 stars in the sky.
Water is the only substance on earth that is lighter as a solid than a liquid.
The White Sands national park in New Mexico is the largest desert with the fine white sand, made of a mineral called gypsum.
Our sun is over 2.5 million miles around at its equator.
After a blistering day of exploring, astronauts may relax with a nice cold glass of ice water from Mercury, the planet closest to the sun. Since there is no atmosphere there to spread the heat around, shadows in deep craters at the poles could hold ice deposited by early comet collisions.
96% of Egypt is made up of the desert sands of the Sahara.
Mount Everest is the tallest mountain in the world, standing 29,028 feet high.
The Amazon rain forest supplies one-fifth of the world’s oxygen!
Where do comets come from? There is a huge cloud of objects made of ice and rock encircling our solar system, called the Oort Cloud. It lies beyond Pluto and extends half way out to the next star. These objects occasionally bump into each other, sending one in towards the sun to become a comet like the recent Hale-Bopp comet.
Every day, eight trillion gallons of water pour out of the mouth of the Amazon River into the Atlantic Ocean.
The ice that covers 98% of Antarctica holds 90% of the world’s fresh water.
Lake Baikal in Russia is the deepest lake in the world, and holds as much water as all the five Great Lakes of the U.S. combined!
Lake Superior, one of the five Great Lakes between the U.S. and the border of Canada, is a freshwater lake with the largest surface area, and it's so big it has waves!
Olympus Mons is a mountain on Mars, which is about fifteen miles high, three times higher than Mount Everest on earth, and at the top it is 45 miles across!
Someday you may go ice fishing on Jupiter’s moon, Europa. Evidence is being constantly discovered that there is an ocean under the ice of Europa. The ice would keep the ocean from evaporating and huge tides caused by Jupiter would keep the ocean temperature above freezing. What kinds of life might there be in such a strange ocean?
The deepest natural caves known to man are the Pierre St. Martin Caves in the Pyrenees Mountains between Spain and France, which reach 4,370 feet deep, almost three times as deep as the Empire State Building is high!
