7 lesser-known facts about our solar system

Here are some interesting and lesser known facts about our solar system that will leave you in awe.

 Its average temperature is roughly -60°C, the same as the South Pole (minus the penguins). Some scientists, in the hopes of making it more habitable, have suggested ways in which we could make Mars warmer. One of these ideas is to build giant mirrors that will reflect the Sun's rays, and kick-start some speedy.

The whole mars is as cold as South Pole

Saturn is the home to Solar System's most epic ice rink. eing Being so far from the Sun, the water in its rings is frozen into ice. It is one of four planets that have rings around them - the other gas planets do too. However, the rest were undiscovered until the 1970s when probes went to explore them. Saturn’s were the first rings seen through telescopes from Earth.

Saturn's rings are 90% water

 If you want vast ocean views, Jupiter’s biggest moon Ganymede is the place to be. The moon is larger than Mercury and would be classed as a planet if it were orbiting the Sun rather than Jupiter.

Jupiter’s largest moon has a salty ocean that contains more water than on Earth

Mercury takes roughly three Earth months to orbit around the Sun. It’s the shortest orbit in the Solar System, because Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun.

Mercury takes roughly three Earth months to orbit the sun

Venus is one of the only two planets that rotates clockwise, and it spins much slower than others in the solar system.

A day is longer than a year on Venus

The first time you may have heard the term ‘dwarf planet’ was when Pluto got demoted to one in 2006 (RIP). However, we actually have six in our Solar System. Pluto, Ceres, Makemake, Haumea, and Eris were the only five that we knew about up until very recently. 

Pluto isn't the only dwarf planet in your solar system -we have six

The Solar System is ancient. To put it into perspective, if the age of the Solar System were a year, humans would appear on Earth just before the countdown on New Year’s Eve.

The Solar System is roughly 4.5 billion years old

This information is not DNA's opinion but obtained from media reports