The universe is vast and full of wonders. Sometimes, however, this vastness places many of the wonders very far from the reach of humanity’s curious eyes. While we have made great strides in understanding what goes on in the farthest reaches of the cosmos, we have only ever looked closely in our cosmic neighborhood.
That is not such a bad thing, however. After all, our neighborhood in space, the Solar System, is chock full of mind-boggling details for us to feast our minds on.
Take, for example, the planet Saturn. The image of this ringed planet is so familiar that we often forget how amazing it is.
Saturn has a ring system made of billions of tiny shards of ice glistening in the light of the Sun. Recent evidence suggests that these rings are relatively young—around a few million years old. If the Solar System’s history were compressed into 24 hours, with the formation of the planets happening at midnight, Saturn got its rings only around 11 in the evening.
These rings hold other delights for the curious. For example, they are probably the remains of a moon that strayed too close and got ripped the planet’s strong gravity. And if you look closely enough, there are small moons called “shepherd moons” that make their haunt in the gaps between the rings. These shepherd moons even create ripples in the rings as they zip along their lanes.
Of course, talking about Saturn would not be complete without mentioning the strange hexagonal storm around its north pole. And speaking of storms, the planet Jupiter has a storm hundreds of years old and many times the size of Earth.
The Solar System is also home to some strange kinds of rain. Some scientists suggest that on at least two planets, Uranus and Neptune, it rains diamonds. Other scientists suggest that Jupiter and Saturn should be added to the list. Diamonds are nothing but carbon compressed by very high pressure, and these planets have carbon and pressure aplenty.
Speaking of rain, on Venus it rains corrosive sulfuric acid. However, it can get so hot on Venus that the rains can evaporate even before they hit the ground.
Mars has two small, irregularly shaped moons that are probably captured asteroids from the nearby Asteroid Belt. The farther of the two moons, Deimos, takes 66 hours to move across the sky when viewed from the Martian surface. The nearer moon, Phobos, orbits Mars so fast it appears to rise in the west and set in the east.
In the Asteroid Belt nearby, asteroid Ida goes around the Sun attended by its very own moon, the smaller asteroid Dactyl. Meanwhile, the asteroid Chariklo, which haunts the region between the gas giants instead of staying in the Asteroid Belt, boasts of being an asteroid with rings.
Since we are talking about the Solar System’s smaller members, it would be a shame not to mention the dwarf planet Pluto and its now famous heart-shaped depression, a large valley covered with carbon monoxide ice. Pluto is a resident of another, colder belt of objects beyond Neptune called the Kuiper Belt.
Another resident of the Kuiper Belt, the dwarf planet Haumea, spins at a dizzying 1 rotation in 4 hours. Because of how fast it spins, Haumea is deformed into the shape of an egg. Only slightly smaller than Pluto, Haumea is twice as long as it is wide.
Speaking of small, Mercury, the smallest of the planets, actually has a thin tail made up of a stream of particles sloughing off its surface.
Even the Solar System’s moons are quite a menagerie. Io orbits so close to Jupiter that the giant planet’s gravity squeezes the moon’s insides, melting the rock into magma and making Io the most volcanic place in the Solar System. Saturn’s Titan, meanwhile, has lakes of liquid methane, while nearby Iapetus looks like a walnut because of the mountain range tracing most of its equator.
This list barely scratches the surface of the Solar System’s abundant treasure trove of curiosities, a trove that only grows bigger as scientists discover more.
In all of this, perhaps the biggest curiosity is our own home planet. The Earth seems, at least for now, to be the only one in this menagerie of worlds to host life. Are we living in a strange neighborhood? If so, is it strange because it is so devoid of life, or because it has life in the first place?
It may take us some time before we can have a close took at other cosmic neighborhoods, so in the meantime we have to make do with closely studying our own. Good thing our Solar System is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to cosmic curiosities.
Pecier Decierdo is the resident physicist and astronomer of The Mind Museum.
