Physical Geography

Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and is the largest planet in the solar system. If Jupiter were hollow, more than one thousand Earths could fit inside. It also contains two and a half times the mass of all the other planets combined. It has a mass of 1.9 × 1027 kg and is 142,800 kilometers (88,736 miles) across the equator.

The outermost layer of the sun is the corona. Only visible during eclipses, it is a low density cloud of plasma with higher transparency than the inner layers. The white corona is a million times less bright than the inner layers of the sun, but is many times larger.

Asteroids, sometimes called minor planets, are small, rocky fragments left over from the formation of our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. Most of this ancient space rubble can be found orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter.

Venus orbits the Sun at an average distance of about 0.72 AU (108,000,000 km), and completes an orbit every 224.65 days. Although all planetary orbits are elliptical, Venus's orbit is the closest to circular, with an eccentricity of less than 0.01.

Earth is the third planet from the Sun in the following order from the Sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. The four smaller inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, also called the terrestrial planets, are primarily composed of rock and metal.

Venus is the brightest planet in our sky and can sometimes be seen with the naked eye if we know where to look. It is the solar system’s brightest planet — yellow clouds of sulfuric acid reflect the sun’s light brightly and has its orbit closest to sun but only next to mercury.

Venus has the highest albedo of any planet in our solar system. Venus is so bright partly because it reflects over 70 per cent of sunlight striking it. It owes its reflective ability to the fact that it’s blanketed with clouds.

In the solar system, the orbit of Mercury is the most eccentric (that is, the least perfectly circular) of the eight planets. It orbits the Sun once in about 88 Earth days, completing three rotations about its axis for every two orbits.

Earth is the Blue Planet because of the vast encompass of oceans on its surface. From space the oceans combined with the atmosphere makes the planet look blue.

A supernova is a stellar explosion that is more energetic than a nova. During this short interval a supernova can radiate as much energy as the Sun is expected to emit over its entire life span.