...Did you know?

That the Sun makes up 99.86% of the Solar System's mass! That means that all the planets put together (including Jupiter) as well as all the asteroids only make up about 0.14% of the Solar System's mass

That Jupiter's magnetic field is so massive that it pours billions of Watts into Earths magnetic field every day!

That a massive body 100km wide travelling at over 512,000km/h crashed into Mercury to form the Caloris Basin. The impaact was so great it sent shockwaves round Mercury creating its hilly lineated terrain.

That just a pinhead of the Sun's raw material could kill someone up to 160 kilometres away!

That the length of a Plutonian year is 248 of our years! That means that one orbit of the Sun takes about 2 and a half Earth centuries. That's a quarter of a Millenium!

That Olympus Mons (on Mars) is the largest Volcanic mountain in the Solar System. It is 600 km across and 27 km high! And you thought Mount Everest (about 8 and a half km high) was tall! To see a great overhead picture of it click here.

That a Supernova explosion produces more energy in its first ten seconds than the Sun during the whole of its 10 billion year lifetime and that for a brief period, it creates more energy than the rest of a galaxy put together!!

That the comet with the longest ever recorded tail is the Great Comet of 1843. Its tail stretched over 800 million kilometres! This is about the same distance the Earth is from Jupiter!

That the energy in the sunlight we see today started out in the core of the Sun 30,000 years ago - it spent most of this time passing through the dense atoms that make the sun and just 8 minutes to reach us once it had left the Sun!

That almost all of the heavier elements in your body (eg calcium, iron, carbon) were made somewhere in supernovae explosions!

That some rocks found on Earth are actually pieces of Mars!

That Saturn has such a low density that it would float if put in water!

That due to the fact that water expands when heated, the Atantic ocean increses in width by 3cm every year!

That some volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io eject material at speeds of up to 1km/second! This is about 20 times faster than the volcanoes here on Earth can manage it!

That the amount of the Sun's energy reaching the Earth's atmosphere (known as the Solar constant) is equivalent to 1.37 kw of electricity per square metre!