THE INDIAN DREAMER

Our Sun is one of about 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the Universe. Though most of them are too faint to be seen, there are more stars in the Universe than there are sand grains on the surface of the Earth.

The impact that created Mercury’s Carolis Basin (which is almost of the size of Uttar Pradesh, India) equaled roughly 1,000,000,000,000 megaton hydrogen bombs. The shock wave from the collision was so powerful that it created a hilly region of the size of Germany and France.

If you want to watch out the whole day on Mercury, staying up from sunrise to sunset, you will have to be up for 176 Earth days.

Venus-not mercury-is the hottest planet in our Solar System.

Earth is hit by up to 10,000,000 kg of meteors everyday without anyone even noticing them. Most of the materials is dust grains, which are so light that they drift gently towards the Earth.

Phobos, the larger of the Mars’ two satellites, is slowly sliding towards Mars. After about 50,000,000 years, it will either smash into the red planet or burst up creating a dusty ring around the planet.

The peak being at 27000 meters, Olympus Mons, the highest Mountain peak, is three times as high as Everest, the highest point on Earth.

If you could drive the minimum distance to Mars at an average highway speed-say 100 kph – it would take more than 66 years to reach the planet from Earth.

First spotted by Galileo way back in 1610, Jupiter’s great red spot is a hurricane-like storm so large that almost three Earths could fit across it.

Jupiter is the largest of all the planets. If it were hollow, more than 1300 Earth’s would fit inside. The giant planet contains two-thirds of all the planetry mass in the Solar System, holding more than 60 moons in its grip.

It is hard to imagine but Saturn is the only planet in the Solar System which is less dense than water. The giant Gas planet would float in a bath tub if such a colossal thing existed.
Do you think upgrading a software on your computer is a painful job. Try doing it from billions of kilometers away. Voyager 2’s mission controllers pulled off a long distance upgrade in 1986 to enable spacecraft to send back sharp pictues taken at high speed in faint sunlight – only 1/400th of the light we see on Earth.

Neptune is our Solar System’s windiest world.Winds whip clouds of frozen Methane across the planet at speeds more than 2,000 kmph. Earth’s most powerful winds hit only about 400 kmph.

Pluto’s trek around the Sun takes 248 years – so long that it hasn’t finished one orbit since it was discovered in 1930.