Your favourite Solar System facts

i'll see if mr b can come up with anything later

Mercury is the only other rocky planet with a strong magnetic field. And if you factor out the effects of gravitational compression, Mercury is the densest planet in the solar system (Earth is denser, but only because of its greater gravity, not because the stuff its made of is actually denser).

Uranus sounds like a bum hole.

It's all about the ring.

If Mars was a candy bar it would be almost inediblely enormous.

You could always point out that, once they've got to the thousand yard point, if they wanted to walk to the Oort cloud it would be around a thousand miles away. The extent of the Sun's gravitational influence is roughly three thousand miles, and the nearest star six thousand miles. I'm doing the maths in my head badly, but that seems about right.

The apparently rare phenomenon known as life exists on the third planet from the sun. It's really quite remarkable.

The Sun's distance from the Earth is about 400 times the Moon's distance, and the Sun's diameter is about 400 times the Moon's diameter. Because these ratios are approximately the same, the Sun and the Moon as seen from Earth appear to be approximately the same size and we get eclipses.

Only for about the next 700,000,000 years.

But by then stellar evolution will have made life on earth impossible anyway

Perhaps, roughly then (assuming some other major impact event or eruption or local supernova doesn't curb life first) but bacteria and viruses may well soldier on for a few more hundred million years until a combination of processes eliminate all planetary water.

What happened to finger-mouse?

That was the hippy pilot episode. The costume budget got properly funded thereafter.

Cool

Helium (the second most common element in the universe after Hydrogen) was discovered in the Sun before it was found on Earth.

In 1868 Joseph Lockyer using a spectrometer attached to a telescope pointing at the Sun, found a line in the yellow region of the solar spectrum to which no match could be found. He named it Helium after Helios (Greek for the Sun). It was not until 25 years later that William Ramsey extracted Helium from the mineral clevite.

Do you know about the Otford Solar System. Maybe you could learn something from them?

http://www.solarsystem.otford.info/

Ooh, cheers, that does look interesting

Thanks for the help everyone, Make Merry was held over Jubilee weekend and was generally regarded as a big success Already planning for next year...

How can you top a solar system?

Galaxy.

Intergalactic bar billiards?

a very very big bomb

This is real.

Clust'er