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9 Feb 2010

Saturn's rings are very wide: 150,000 miles in diameter. But very thin: only a few hundred yards thick.

Jupiter is big enough to swallow all the other planets.

Pluto is so far from the Sun that it takes 248 years to travel around it once.

Sixty Five million years ago, a ten-kilometre rock from space hit the Yucatan Peninsula in Central America. The resulting pall of dust, which drowned out the sunlight for nearly a year - not to mention vicious forest fires and huge tidal waves - wiped out most of the animal species on Earth, including the dinosaurs.

When the sun is directly overhead, its rays travel 93 million miles through space and then penetrate the atmosphere, a 20-mile thick layer of air that coats the planet. When the sun is sitting just above the horizon, its rays penetrate about 12 times more atmosphere than at midday.