EDE71610 planets poster inside:planets poster changed AW

9/1/09

15:12

Page 1

a guide to the PLANETS

MERCURY
Discovered: Known since 3,000 years BC. Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun and the smallest in our Solar System. Named after the Roman messenger god, the planet is not much larger than the Earth's Moon and superficially resembles it with a surface pock-marked by enormous craters. These craters were caused by meteorites smashing into the planet's surface in the early stages of the Solar System's evolution, some four billion years ago. Although it's only a third the size of Earth, Mercury is almost as dense. Scientists put this down to a massive iron core, which is also responsible for Mercury's magnetic field.

THE SOLAR SYSTEM

Our Solar System consists of the Sun and everything that revolves around it. As well as the planets that orbit the Sun, many other bodies inhabit the Solar System. They include satellites of the main planets, such as our moon, and various asteroids and comets. Even as you read these words, you are travelling at around 500 miles per hour as the Earth spins on its axis. As the Earth goes round the Sun, it moves at almost 19 miles every second. OUR NEAREST NEIGHBOURS The nearest planet to us is usually Venus, but sometimes Mars or Mercury are closer. The distances constantly vary because not all planets are in the same orbit. Venus is the closest planet to Earth in terms of size but has an atmosphere 90 times as dense as ours, composed mainly of carbon dioxide. Mars is roughly half the size of Earth and has a very thin atmosphere. It is known as the red planet due to iron oxide dust (rust) on the surface. Mars has seasons like ours and frozen poles, although these are made of frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice). The Phoenix Mars Lander has recently discovered water ice on Mars, raising speculation that it once supported life forms and might still do. Slightly smaller than Mars, Mercury is the innermost planet in the solar system, orbiting the Sun every 88 days. It is heavily cratered like our Moon, but its surface temperature can range from 427oC to minus 183oC. THE GAS GIANTS 344 million miles beyond Mars is Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system and the first of the Gas Giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune). These planets do not have a suface as such, but consist of a small solid core surrounded by outer layer of mostly hydrogen and helium. It has the largest moon in the solar system, Ganymede which is bigger than Mercury. SATURN has a prominent system of rings composed of ice, rocks and dust. Its moon Titan has a nitrogen and methgane atmosphere and is thought to have an underground ocean, possibly hosting microbial life forms. URANUS was discovered in 1781. 1.78 billion miles from the Sun, It has a blue green appearance and unusually is tipped on its side, thought to be as the result of a planetary collision early in its existance. It has a faint ring system like Saturn and winds of up to 560 miles per hour. NEPTUNE was the first planet to be discovered by mathematical prediction as opposed to optical observation. 2.8 billion miles from the Sun, it takes 165 years to complete one orbit. Like Uranus, the colour of its atmosphere comes from the presence of methane gas, but Neptune is a much deeper blue, the cause of which is still a mystery.

VENUS
Discovered: In the prehistoric age Venus is the second planet from the Sun and is named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty. The landscape consists of rolling plains, mountain ranges, lava flows and volcanoes. A compass wouldn't work on Venus because there is no discernible magnetic field. Venus has a similar chemical composition and density to the Earth but any water the planet might have had evaporated long ago due to its closeness to the Sun and the planet's runaway greenhouse effect. Also, its thick clouds of sulphuric acid and carbon dioxide make Venus one of the most inhospitable places in the Solar System. The surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead. There are 217mph winds at high altitude and the surface pressure is equivalent to 7 miles below sea level on Earth.

EARTH
Age: 4.6 billion years The third planet from the Sun, Earth is an average-sized green and blue planet with a single moon. But it is distinctly special for humankind because it occupies a so-called 'Goldilocks' zone of space. It is neither too hot, nor too cold, possessing the perfect conditions for life. The name Earth comes from the Anglo-Saxon word Erda, meaning ground, soil and earth. Three quarters of the planet is covered by vast oceans of water, thought to have arrived from a shower of comets. The thick atmosphere contains a complex weather system and its layers extend more than 347 miles from the Earth's surface. It is made up of 77 per cent nitrogen and 21 per cent oxygen as well as small amounts of other gases such as carbon dioxide and protects us from harmful ultraviolet radiation from the Sun.

MARS
Discovered: Prehistoric times Mars is named after the Roman God of war and is often known as the Red Planet. Mars' orange-red appearance results from soil rich in iron oxide (more commonly known as rust). Galileo was the first person to observe the planet through a telescope in the early 1600s. Its distinctive colour, associated by the Romans with blood, makes Mars a highly visible planet in the night sky and it can be seen with the naked eye. Mars' orbit is closest to the Earth every 26 months. Although relatively small - its radius is about half that of the Earth's - Mars boasts scenery on a massive scale, including Olympus Mons the highest volcano in the Solar System

JUPITER
Discovered: Prehistoric times The largest object in our Solar System, Jupiter is a planetary tour de force. More than a thousand Earths would fit inside it and Jupiter has moons larger than planets. It is also home to storms that have raged for hundreds of years. No wonder it was named after the Roman king of the gods. This enormous orange gas giant is made up of 90 per cent hydrogen. The atmosphere is not only poisonous, its pressure is so strong deep down that hydrogen gas is compressed into a liquid and any spacecraft would be crushed. Although it takes 12 years to orbit the Sun, Jupiter only has a ten hour day. As a result, the planet rotates so fast that it produces violent winds, bulges 9,000 km at its equator and stretches the striped white clouds of ammonia ice. Its distinctive Red Spot is a 40,000 km storm system and could swallow the entire Earth.

2009 SPACE ODYSSEY

SATURN
Discovered: Prehistoric times Named after the Roman god of agriculture, Saturn is the second largest planet in our Solar System. Its icy rocky core is surrounded by hydrogen and helium with traces of methane, ammonia and water ice. Saturn, like Jupiter, is known as a gas giant. Engulfed in yellow clouds of ammonia, the planet's wispy orange stripes result from 1,770 km per hour winds and hot air from the planet's interior. It also spins rapidly on its axis, completing a full rotation every 10 hours 39 minutes. Saturn is circled by a majestic halo of concentric rings and is the most distant planet visible to the naked eye.

URANUS
Discovered: 1781 by William Herschel The seventh planet from the Sun is blue-green in colour with bright clouds, multiple rings and strange moons. The third largest planet in the Solar System, Uranus is named after the Greek god of the heavens and was the first planet to be discovered through a telescope. Uranus has a total of 13 rings and 27 known moons, all named after characters in works by William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. A day on the planet lasts 17 hours while a year on Uranus is equivalent to 84 Earth years.

NEPTUNE
Discovered: 1846 (proved mathematically 1845) Named after the Roman god of the sea, Neptune is about four times larger than Earth and is the fourth largest planet in our Solar System. Now that Pluto has been officially demoted to a dwarf planet, Neptune is the only planet in our Solar System that cannot be seen with the naked eye. Although Pluto is further away from the Sun, every 248 years it moves inside Neptune's orbit for around 20 years. A day on Neptune lasts 17 hours but each year is the equivalent of 165 years on Earth. It has a ring system, which is not as pronounced as Saturn's, and several moons. The largest moon is Triton (1,680 miles in diameter).

PLUTO
Discovered in 1930, Pluto is smaller than our Moon. It is thought to have a surface of frozen methane and nitrogen and a thin atmossphere. In 2006 was re classified as a Dwarf Planet as it does not meet the criteria for a planet. It takes 248 years to orbit the Sun.

MERCURY
Average miles from sun Diameter

VENUS
67,000,000 7,521 miles

EARTH
93,000,000 7,926 miles

MARS
141,000,000 4,221 miles

JUPITER
483,000,000 88,734 miles

SATURN
886,000,000 74,566 miles

URANUS
1,782,000,000 31,556 miles

NEPTUNE
2,794,000,000 30,199 miles

PLUTO
3,661,000,000 1,450 miles

36,000,000 3,031 miles

THE PIONEER AND VOYAGER MISSIONS

In 1977 NASA launched Voyagers 1 and 2. About the size of a small car, both probes were designed to study and photograph Jupiter and Saturn, but went on to send back data on all the outer planets except for Pluto, and made amazing discoveries such as volcanoes on Jupiters moons and the previously unknown rings of Neptune. The earlier Pioneer probes carried metal plaques with diagrams identifying their origin, but the Voyagers carried greetings in many languages plus sounds and images from Earth with pictorial instructions for how to play the disc in the event that they are discovered by intelligent extra terrestrials. These tiny space ships have now gone beyond all the planets in our Solar System and are approaching interstellar space. Assuming they survive the journey, and even though they are travelling at more than 36,000 miles per hour, it will be over 40,000 years before they come close to another solar system.

ASTEROIDS
Asteroids are irregular fragments of rock and metal left over from the formation of the Solar System 4.6 billion years ago. Millions of asteroids are thought to orbit the Sun and are largely concentrated in a belt, 111 million miles wide, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. They range in size from less than half a mile across to the largest known asteroid, Ceres, which is 584 miles in diameter, and has recently been reclassified as a dwarf planet. Stray asteroids have hit Earth in the past. Many scientists believe one impact, around 65 million years ago in an area now known as Mexico, was responsible for a sudden change in climate and the extinction of dinosaurs. In February 2001 the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission achieved the first ever landing on the asteroid Eros.

EDE71610 planets poster inside:planets poster changed AW

9/1/09

15:13

Page 2

DISCOVERING THE PLANETS

The five naked eye planets - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn - have been known for millennia. Therefore, no one person can be said to have discovered these bodies. However, the case of the three outer planets Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto - is different. These planets were discovered with telescopes by specific individuals, and the first discovery, that of Uranus, caused a sensation throughout the world.
William Herschel

(1781) URANUS William Herschel, at that time an amateur astronomer in Bath, England, was making a systematic survey of the sky, noting nebulae, double stars, and the occasional comet. In 1781 he discovered a small green object that he assumed was a comet. However, after following it for a few days, it was clear that it was orbiting the sun as a planet. He had discovered the planet we now know as Uranus, although his original designation was Georgium Sidus or Georges Star, after Englands reigning monarch, George III. The effect on Herschels career was dramatic. George III awarded Herschel a lifetime salary so that he could concentrate full time on astronomy. (1845) NEPTUNE While the discovery of Uranus was an accident, Neptune was actively searched for. A detailed study of Uranus orbit indicated that an unseen object was making it deviate from the expected path. Two astronomers, John Adams in England and Urbain Le Verrier in France, made detailed mathematical calculations that predicted where the planet would be found. Both men gave the calculations to observational astronomers, and observers in several countries found the planet very close to the predicted location in 1845. However, Le Verriers observational team was the first to report the discovery and is usually given the credit. The planet was christened Neptune, in keeping with the classical theme of naming planets.

ASTEROID WATCHDOGS
The astronomer William Herschel first used the word asteroid (Greek for star-like) to describe these celestial objects. The asteroid belt is relatively stable but occasionally gravity from a larger body, such as a planet, pulls one of them out of orbit. Stray asteroids have hit Earth in the past. The chances of an impact similar to the one which is thought to have wiped out the Dinosaurs are, thankfully, slim but ground-based telescopes are monitoring Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) - defined as those whose orbits are able to approach or cross the orbit of Earth. Telescopes on Earth track NEAs and detect new asteroids in case any of them are in an orbit that might collide with our planet. Even a relatively small impact from space would cause enormous damage. Meteor Crater in Winslow, Arizona. was formed 50,000 years ago when a nickel-iron meteorite, 150 feet in diameter and traveling at 40,000 mph, hit the earth. The meteorite vaporized during its descent. The crater is 4,500 feet in diameter and 570 feet deep. The impact was equivalent to 2.5 megatons of TNT, or 150 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb. In 1908, what is thought to be a meteor exploded above a remote area of Siberia. Although the meteor or comet burst in the air rather than directly hitting the surface, this event is still referred to as an impact. Estimates of the energy of the blast range from 5 megatons to as high as 30 megatons of TNT. The explosion knocked over an estimated 80 million trees over 830 square miles. It is thought that the earthquake from the blast would have measured 5.0 on the Richter scale.

Urbain Le Verrier

LIFE ON MARS?
Was Mars once a living world? Does life continue, even today, in a holding pattern, waiting until the next global warming event comes along? Many people would like to believe so. Scientists are no exception. But so far no evidence has been found that convinces even a sizable minority of the scientific community that the red planet was ever home to life. What the evidence does indicate, though, is that Mars was once a habitable world. Life, as we know it, could have taken hold there. The discoveries made by NASA's Opportunity rover at Eagle Crater leave no doubt that the area was once drenched in water. It might have been shallow water. It might not have been there for long. And billions of years might have passed since it dried up. But liquid water was there, at the martian surface, and that means that living organisms might have been there, too. Liquid water may have flowed episodically over the surface of Mars in the planet's distant past. Even if life did gain a foothold on Mars, it's unlikely that it ever evolved beyond the martian equivalent of terrestrial single-celled bacteria. It took life on Earth billions of years to evolve beyond single-celled organisms. Bacteria are amazingly diverse, various species occupying extreme niches of temperature from sub freezing to above boiling, living in sulfuric acid and surviving with or without oxygen. In fact, there are few habitats on Earth where one or another species of bacterium can't survive. Photosynthesis came relatively late to life on Earth. Early life had to get its energy from chemical interactions between rocks and dirt, water, and gases in the atmosphere. If life ever emerged on Mars, it might never have evolved beyond this primitive stage.

JUPITERS COMET STRIKE

Comet Shoemaker-Levy was a comet that collided with Jupiter in 1994, providing the first direct observation of an extraterrestrial collision of solar system objects. This generated a large amount of coverage in the popular media, and was closely observed by astronomers worldwide. The collision provided new information about Jupiter and highlighted its role in attracting space debris in the inner solar system and reducing impacts on other planets - like ours. The comet was discovered by astronomers Carolyn and Eugene M. Shoemaker and David Levy. Shoemaker-Levy 9 was located on the night of March 24, 1993, in a photograph taken at the Palomar Observatory in California. It was the first comet observed to be orbiting a planet. As the comet got closer to the planet, it broke into several fragments which collided with Jupiter's southern hemisphere between July 16 and July 22, 1994, at a speed of over 100,000 miles per hour. The prominent scars from the impacts were more easily visible than the Great Red Spot and persisted for many months.

2009 SPACE ODYSSEY

Todays free poster

THE PLANETS

PIONEER 10
Pioneer 10 was launched on March 2, 1972, on a 21 month mission. It became the first spacecraft to pass through the asteroid belt and the first to obtain close-up images of Jupiter. In 1983, it became the first manmade object to leave the Solar System when it passed the orbit of Pluto. The Pioneer 10 spacecraft, destined to be the first man-made object to escape our solar system, carries this plaque. It is designed to show scientifically educated inhabitants of some other star system who might intercept it perhaps thousands of years from now. When Pioneer was launched, from where, and by what kind of beings. The design is engraved into a gold-anodized aluminum plate, 152 by 229 millimeters (6 by 9 inches), attached to the spacecraft's antenna support struts in a position to help shield it from erosion by interstellar dust. After travelling 12.2 billion kilometres from Earth, we have now lost contact with our most distant spacecraft. The last signal received by Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Deep Space Network was on 22 January 2003. The spacecraft was so distant that the signal, travelling at the speed of light, took 11 hours and 20 minutes to arrive.

Content & Images supplied courtesy of:

Poster design by Jonathan Simms

2009 SPACE ODYSSEY

Todays free poster

(1930) Pluto The fact that a planet had been discovered mathematically caused as great a sensation among scientists as the original discovery of Uranus had a century earlier. Thus the orbit of Neptune was carefully scrutinized to see if still other planets lurked in the darkness beyond. By the turn of the twentieth century most planetary astronomers had convinced themselves that Neptune was indeed showing the signs of being tugged by an as yet undiscovered ninth planet. This effect was much smaller than the corresponding effect on Uranus, and, therefore, the search for Planet X (as the unseen planet came to be called) was much more difficult.

THE PLANETS

Don't miss tomorrow's Star Chart poster

Two American observatories, Harvard Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona devoted a good deal of resources in the early decades of the 20th century to finding Planet X. Success finally came in 1930 when Clyde Tombaugh at Lowell found a dim star-like point moving through a set of photographic plates. This planet was called Pluto. When astronomers at the Lowell observatory announced the discovery of Pluto in 1930, they claimed it was several times larger than Earth, ensuring that it was quickly labelled the ninth planet. But as it turned out, Pluto is substantially smaller than the moon. In 2006, Pluto was re-classified as a Dwarf Planet at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union, officially reducing the Solar system back to eight planets.

www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk
Don't miss tomorrow's Star Chart poster

www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk