Everyone should have some aspect of life that interests them enough to seek information just for the sake of knowledge, curiosity, and yes, the pleasure of reading about it. Call it satisfying your geeky side. We all should have it. You know what I mean, or you should. When you go into a library or have a nice evening at a Borders, Barnes & Noble, Waldenbooks, or another one of your favorite bookstores (you DO have a favorite bookstore, right?), there is a section that you always eventually end up grabbing a book from, even if you don’t know it. It could be cars, computers, plants, states, oceans, sharks, or anything. You just like to read about it, and that’s a good thing. You don’t have to be an expert, and there aren’t necessarily posters of your minor obsession anywhere in your bedroom, not anymore, at least. It is just your thing that you like to read about.
My reading fixation is the Sun, Stars, and Planets of the Solar System.So as this blog is for talking about things we don’t normally talk about as black Americans, let me spread some knowledge about our Solar System.
The Solar System is the name given to our Sun and the family of planets, asteroids, stars, and comets that orbit it. Our Solar System is about a million times wider than the Earth.
The most important member of our Solar System is the Sun. The Sun is about 740 times more massive than all of the planets put together. Its powerful gravitational pull keeps the Solar System together and controls the movements of the planets and other objects.
The Sun is about 4.6 billion years old, and the source of its energy lies deep inside it center, where the nuclear reactions that keep it shining take place. The temperature at the center of the Sun is about 27 million degrees.
Now for the planets:
Mercury is the innermost planet, thus it has the shortest year, going around the Sun in about 88 days. It is not the hottest planet, despite its proximity to the Sun, and has no satellites, or moons.
Venus is the hottest planet due to its carbon dioxide atmosphere that's denser than water. The orbit of Venus lies between the Earth and the Sun, so it can only be seen in the twilight after sunset or before sunrise.
As far as we know, the Earth is unique in the Solar System for two reasons: it has liquid water on its surface and it supports life. Both are probably dependent on each other. Earth is the largest of the four inner terrestrial, rocky planets. Its atmosphere is about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 1% other gases. The Earth's moon has a maximum distance of 253,000 miles from the Earth and it takes just over 27 days to orbit our blue sphere.
Mars shines very brightly when closest to the Earth, with its gleaming reddish color. Mars is clearly the only planet possible at this time for human exploration, due to a successful unmanned Viking mission landing in 1976 followed by others that are more recent. Mars is the last of the rocky planets, and a vast gap of asteroids exists between it and the giant gas world Jupiter.
An enormous asteroid belt exists between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, containing about 100,000 bodies larger than 0.6 miles across. Over 3000 of the largest have been given names. The larges known, Ceres, has a diameter of 620 miles. Some asteroids have orbits that take them very close to the Earth. However, threat of an asteroid colliding with our planet is very, very small.At this point, we will end our observation of the Solar System until a future blog post. When we return with this subject, we will focus on the four giant gas planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune...plus the shy and distance Pluto, with cousin Charon.
Until then, keep on reading about your own obsession.
