Quick Facts
Distance from the Sun:
Radius: 3958 miles
Gravity: 9.8 m/s^2
Surface Temperature: -126F to 136F (mean temperature of 61F)
Atmospheric Composition: 79% Nitrogen and 20% oxygen
Moons: one
Earth is the third planet from the sun, and the only place in our universe where we have found life.
The seasons are caused by the tilt of the axis. As the Earth orbits the sun, the tilt causes the sunlight to strike the planet at angles, so the weaker the angle, the colder the weather will be. That's also why sunlight seems to beat down on you in summer and hardly seems to warm you up at all during winter.
The moon is thought to have formed when a large body the size of Mars, name Thea, struck it. The debris then flew off and later formed the moon. The impact is also responsible for the tilt. After the Apollo astronauts brought back samples from the lunar surface, we found out that the Earth and the moon are made of exactly the same stuff.
Radius: 3958 miles
Gravity: 9.8 m/s^2
Surface Temperature: -126F to 136F (mean temperature of 61F)
Atmospheric Composition: 79% Nitrogen and 20% oxygen
Moons: one
Earth is the third planet from the sun, and the only place in our universe where we have found life.
The seasons are caused by the tilt of the axis. As the Earth orbits the sun, the tilt causes the sunlight to strike the planet at angles, so the weaker the angle, the colder the weather will be. That's also why sunlight seems to beat down on you in summer and hardly seems to warm you up at all during winter.
The moon is thought to have formed when a large body the size of Mars, name Thea, struck it. The debris then flew off and later formed the moon. The impact is also responsible for the tilt. After the Apollo astronauts brought back samples from the lunar surface, we found out that the Earth and the moon are made of exactly the same stuff.
Water
70% percent of the Earth's surface is covered in water, but 97% of that is salt water. 2 percent of the water is locked away in the polar ice caps, leaving less than 1 percent for drinking, growing food and all the other activities that we need water for. The water cycle constantly evaporates water from the oceans and streams and then once it condenses into clouds, rains it back down on the world below. Earth is the only place in the solar system where Earth can be found in all three states: ice, liquid and vapor.
Trivia
- There are over 20'000 artificial objects orbiting the planet right now.
- A day, which is the amount of time it takes the Earth to rotate on its axis, isn't 24 hours long. It's only 23 hours and 56 minutes
- 20 percent of the worlds' oxygen is produced by the Amazon rain forest. The downside to this is that we're slowly destroying the forest.
- The average global temperature has gone up 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the industrial revolution. That might not sound like a lot, but that small difference melts the glaciers and permafrost, causes floods in low lying areas, and makes all weather patterns more severe and less predictable.
- If Earth's history had been condensed into 24 hours, life would have appeared at 4 am, land plants at 10:24 pm, dinosaurs would have gone extinct at 11:41 pm and humans would have appeared at 11:58:43 pm.
- If you drilled a hole from one side of the Earth to the other, it would take 42 minutes to fall through it.
Pale Blue Dot
In the 1970's, NASA launched the twin voyager probes. In 1990, Voyager 1 turned around and looked backwards, taking a final picture of the Earth. At a distance of 3.7 billion miles, the Earth appears as a spec of dust, floating in the emptiness of space. (the colored lines are from the filters used in the camera and aren't actually anything in space)
In the 1970s, when the photo of Earthrise was sent back to Earth, people started to realize how small and fragile our world is. The term "Spaceship Earth," which had been created decades before, gained popularity, to describe Earth as "a single spaceship traveling through the fathomless void of the cosmos." The phrase highlighted how much each species on Earth relies on all of the other species, and that by removing one species, you can in fact, drastically change life for all of the others. It also showed how finite our planet is, and that if we kill it, it’s over. Our planet is small and precious and we need to protect it.