Even at a glance, the planets in our solar system are wildly diverse. Huge and small, airless and densely packed with atmosphere, they have a wide range of characteristics distinguishing them. But if I was backed into a corner, which one would I choose as the oddest of them all?<\/p>\n
Easy: Venus is the weirdest planet in the solar system.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a reason we call it Earth\u2019s evil twin. For reasons that are still unclear, long ago it suffered a massive runaway greenhouse effect, filling its atmosphere with heat-trapping carbon dioxide. The result is a planet with 90 times the surface pressure of Earth\u2019s, a temperature above 460 degrees Celsius (860 degrees Fahrenheit) and clouds made of sulfuric acid.<\/p>\n
Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter from Scientific American and join a community of science-loving readers.<\/a><\/p>\n Yet in its troposphere at an altitude of about 50 to 60 kilometers, Venus\u2019s pressure and temperature are similar to those of Earth at sea level. The acid clouds and poisonous air would still be a problem, but in theory, it\u2019s possible that humans could someday live in floating habitats high in the Cytherean<\/a> skies\u2014strange indeed.<\/p>\n Jupiter is the weirdest planet in the solar system. With a width of 11 Earths wide and a mass that is more than 300 times that of our planet, it\u2019s a gas giant\u2014a colossal bag of hydrogen and helium that turns into a bizarre liquid mix lower in its atmosphere and eventually becomes metallic even deeper down. As far as we can tell, Jupiter has a core of metal and rock, but it\u2019s fuzzy and mushy\u2014not at all like the obvious delineated layers we enjoy on our home world. And it has a powerful magnetic field that billows in the solar wind to stretch outward for hundreds of millions of kilometers, making this the largest continuous structure in the solar system after the sun\u2019s heliosphere<\/a>. If our eyes could see it, Jupiter\u2019s magnetosphere would appear bigger than the full moon in the sky!<\/p>\n Mercury is the weirdest planet in our solar system. Scorched by the sun, it\u2019s locked in a gravitational tug-of-war with our star<\/a> that, over time, has forced the planet to spin three times for every two times it orbits the sun. Coupled with its elliptical orbit, this has strange effects; there are spots on the surface where, in the morning, you could watch the sun rise for a time, then set and then rise again, all near the same spot in the sky<\/a>. And despite Mercury\u2019s intense irradiation, there are deep, cold craters near its poles that never see sunlight and harbor water ice. It\u2019s a planet of paradoxes.<\/p>\n Neptune is the weirdest planet in the solar system. The most distant major planet from the sun and the last stop before interstellar space, Neptune is only dimly illuminated by our star, receiving just 0.1 percent as much light as Earth does. It was discovered not by direct observation but with gravitational effect on Uranus<\/a>, although it was spotted, unrecognized at the time, by Galileo centuries earlier. Its internal heat powers our solar system\u2019s fastest winds, measured at an incredible 2,200 kilometers per hour\u2014faster than the speed of sound. Don\u2019t ever try to fly a kite at Neptune. It\u2019ll tear your arms off.<\/p>\n Mars is the weirdest planet in the solar system. A tenth the mass of Earth, it nonetheless has the solar system\u2019s tallest mountain and grandest canyon. It\u2019s covered in fine-grained dust composed of various kinds of iron oxide: rust. The atmosphere is lousy with the stuff, tinting the air a butterscotch color\u2014except near the sun in the sky, where light scattering creates a blue aura that is best visible at sunset. This makes it the opposite of Earth<\/a>, with its blue skies and red sunsets.<\/p>\n Uranus is the weirdest planet in the solar system. Eons ago, some catastrophic event knocked the huge ice giant on its side, and it now orbits the sun with an axial tilt of 98 degrees. This gives it extreme seasons, each lasting 21 Earth years. At its north pole, for example, it takes about four decades after sunrise for our star to set again. And for years, at the height of summer, the sun is nearly directly overhead. On top of this, Uranus\u2019s magnetic field axis is offset from the center of the planet by about 8,000 km. This may have the same cause as the world\u2019s tilt; perhaps it was hit by another massive planet not long after it formed, knocking Uranus catawampus. On top of all that, it may also rain diamonds there<\/a>.<\/p>\n Saturn is the weirdest planet in the solar system. It\u2019s actually lower in density than water; the oldest joke in astronomy is that if you threw Saturn in a bathtub, it would float, but it would leave a ring. Its gorgeous ring system is the most spectacular thing in our planetary neighborhood<\/a>, yet if you gathered up all the ice ring particles, they would only make a small moon less than 400 km wide\u2014one more satellite to add to Saturn\u2019s horde of known moons, some 285 in all. And as impressive as its rings may be, the planet also boasts an immense hexagonal vortex<\/a> almost 30,000 km across at its north pole\u2014so huge Earth could comfortably pass through one of its sides. This is actually a natural atmospheric feature that still looks very much like an alien portal into another place in time and space.<\/p>\n Unsurprisingly, I could go on and on about how strange any given planet in the solar system is\u2014not to mention the smaller objects such as Pluto, as well as the moons, asteroids, comets, Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud objects\u2014but this is our own prejudice coloring our view.<\/p>\n When it comes right down to it, Earth is the weirdest planet in the solar system\u2014by far. For one thing, it has plate tectonics\u2014the sliding and buckling of great slabs of rock that constantly reshapes its surface\u2014a feature that isn\u2019t found anywhere else around the sun. Earth also has an unusually large moon relative to its size, a ratio far larger than that of any other moon around a major planet.<\/p>\n Even stranger, Earth\u2019s distance from the sun, coupled with its inherent atmospheric greenhouse effect, gives our planet a surface temperature where water can coexist in three phases: solid, liquid and gas. This situation is unique among the sun\u2019s planets and is critical for Earth\u2019s exceptional status; water is an excellent medium for life to arise and evolve. It can dissolve and mix important prebiotic minerals, and its water cycle\u2014in which water evaporates over the oceans, rains out in a different location and then washes back to the sea\u2014transports these materials to places where they can concentrate and churn up complexity.<\/p>\n Over time\u2014billions of years\u2014these simpler materials have bumped and ground and fallen apart and reformed, taking advantage of the chemistry around them and energy from the sun to become the astonishing and dazzling variety of biology we see all around us.<\/p>\n You want weird? Of all the hundreds of worlds in our solar system, only one is known to have life, and you live on it.<\/p>\n Weirdness is relative, though. We are still probing these other places, looking and sniffing around to search for life, extant or otherwise. We may yet find it, several times over. And if we do, Earth may wind up being not so weird after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Even at a glance, the planets in our solar system are wildly diverse. Huge and small, airless and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":386469,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[3146,126340,111,139,69,147,3145,392],"class_list":{"0":"post-386468","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-earth","9":"tag-mass-of-earth","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-solar-system","15":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=386468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386468\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/386469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=386468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=386468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=386468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}