Looking For Interesting Facts About The Solar System.........

[ToraToraTora]

I'll start....The Jovian Moon IO is so close to Jupiter that it has tides in rock. The moon is continually stretched into an Oviod and thus the friction causes lots of volcanoes.

[ToraToraTora]

BA goes to the first one I didn't know already.......

[newmodarmy]

On average Mercury is closer to Earth than Venus is.

https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/online/30593/Venus-is-not-Earth-s-closest-neighbor

[Khandro]

My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Noodles.

Geddit?

[newmodarmy]

Furthermore, from that same article, Mercury is the closest neighbour, on average, to each of the other seven planets in the solar system.

[newmodarmy]

My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Noodles only works in terms of distance from the sun.

That doesn't translate to average distances from earth (or otheer planets) because of the orbit paths around the sun. 

[ToraToraTora]

10:39 yes I did know that.

10:40 Mnemonic for order of the planets.

[Ellipsis]

> Mnemonic for order of the planets

With the tricky outer planets, my aide memoire is "the other sun in the solar system" - Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.

[ToraToraTora]

Did you know that Neptune was discovered by prediction? in 1846 French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier predicted that a planet must be there beyond Uranus by using Newtonian physics and maths alone. The orbit if Uranus was wrong and clearly influenced by another mass. He set about predicting its location. It was later that year observed by Johan Galle within one degree of his prediction. Genius! More later on this because he also tried the same thing that didn't work and that was Einstein's "fault"!

[sddsddean]

Tell someone to stand still...then tell them they are not.

Rotational velocity of the Earth at the Latitude of the UK is about 600mph.

The Earth is travelling at around 66,000 mph round the sun.

The sun is doing about 518,000 round the Milky Way.

So total speed can be about 584,600mph!

[Khandro]

'tis all relative.

[ToraToraTora]

Yes sddssdean, speed is only really meaningful when you quote it as relative to something else. Then there is our galaxy moving at 1.3million MPH around the "great attractor" - fascinating. So I'm typing this at at least 1.3million MPH!

[sddsddean]

...but I can still balance a pencil on its end on my desk!!

[Prudie]

I don't have one but I do have a question which quite coincidentally popped inot my head alst night. The answer may be obvious but whenever space is depicted in films (actual space, not landed on a planet) or space walks eg The Martian, Gravity, countless others, why is it always dark? Does the sun not light up the 'space' around them as it does during daylight on earth. Is it something to do with our atmosphere or what?

[Atheist]

Prudie, the light from the sun is only visible when it hits something, such as a planet or a spaceship or a cloud or even a gas such as air. We can see things in space (unless they are somewhere where the sunlight doesn't go, e.g. behind a planet).

 

[bhg481]

Light travels in straight lines so you only see it if you look directly at the source or it reflects off something towards you. In space there is nothing so nothing to reflect the light towards you.

[ToraToraTora]

also prudie it's often not dark but the sky is black. eg one of the things the moon "hoax" morons go on about is, why are there no stars in the sky? It's because the sky is black but it is in day light so just as on earth you cannot see the stars. The sky is blue on earth because the longer wave lengths of visible light are scattered by the atmosphere the moon has virtually no atmosphere.

[ToraToraTora]

Come on that BA is still unclaimed.

[douglas9401]

If I may, some say the sun shine out of Uranus.

[THECORBYLOON]

All the planets could fit between the earth and the moon.

https://sciencenotes.org/can-you-fit-all-the-planets-between-the-earth-and-moon/

[nescio]

If you had a sufficiently large container of water, in a suitable gravitational field and immersed Saturn in it, it would float.