# Light from the sun takes 8 minutes to reach you, thus you see the sun as it was 8 minutes ago. It might have blown up 4 minutes ago and you wouldn't know about it!
# The Earth is not a sphere! It actually is an oblate spheroid, it is squashed slightly at the poles and bulges out at the equator due to its rotation.
# Spare a thought for the constellations that never made it into the official list... these include Machina Electrica (the electricity generator), Officina Typographica (The Printing Office), and Turdus Solitarius (the solitary thrush)
# When Galileo viewed Saturn for the first time through a telescope, he described the planet as having "ears". It was not until 1655 that Christian Huygens suggested the crazy theory that they might be an enormous set of rings around the planet.
# If you could put Saturn in an enormous bathtub, it would float. The planet is less dense than water.
# A teaspoon-full of Neutron star would weigh about 112 million tonnes.
# Jupiter is heavier than all the other planets put together.
# Even on the clearest night, the human eye can only see about 3,000 stars. There are an estimated 100,000,000,000 in our galaxy alone!
# The tallest mountain in the solar system is Olympus Mons, on Mars at a height of about 15 miles, three times the height of Mount Everest. It covers an area about half the size of Spain.
# If the sun were the size of a dot on an ordinary-sized letter 'i', then the nearest star would be 10 miles away.
# Half-a-billionth of the energy released by the sun reaches the Earth
# Temperatures on Venus are hot enough to melt lead.
# If you could travel at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) it would take 100,000 years to cross our galaxy!
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Only one side of the moon ever faces Earth. The moons period of rotation is exactly the same as it's period of orbit.
# Betelgeuse, the bright star on Orion's top-left shoulder, is so big that if it was placed where the sun is, it would swallow up Earth, Mars and Jupiter!
# If you stand on the equator, you are spinning at about 1,000 mph in as the Earth turns, as well as charging along at 67,000 mph round the sun.
# On the equator you are about 3% lighter than at the poles, due to the centrifugal* force of the Earth spinning.
# The atmosphere on Earth is proportionately thinner than the skin on an apple.
# On Mercury a day (the time it takes for it to spin round once) is 59 Earth-days. Its year (the time it takes to orbit the sun) is 88 days- that means there are fewer than 2 days in a year!
# If a piece of the sun the size of a pinhead were to be placed on Earth, you could not safely stand within 90 miles of it!
# Its estimated that the number of stars in the universe is greater than the number of grains of sand on all the beaches in the world! On a clear night, we can see the equivalent of a handful of sand.
# Every year the sun evaporates 100,000 cubic miles of water from Earth (that weighs 400 trillion tonnes!)
# Jupiter acts as a huge vacuum cleaner, attracting and absorbing comets and meteors. Some estimates say that without Jupiters gravitational influence the number of massive projectiles hitting Earth would be 10,000 times greater.
# Astronomers believe that space is not a complete vacuum- there are three atoms per cubic metre.
# Saturn is not the only planet with rings- Neptune has it's own ring system.
This are the few of million facts known and billion facts still unknown...
