Page 76 - Orange Butterfly (2)

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unit 6
4. Extension to Science
The Planets that Are and the Planet that Was
do you ever stop and think about the ground you are standing on? Probably not. But it’s actually incredibly interesting! We are all standing on a giant spinning rock that is going in circles around a giant ball of fire at more than 65, 000 miles an hour, and we rarely stop to think about it! We are all surrounded by strange, incredibly different planets.
Some of these are actually pretty close when you think of how incredibly huge space is.
Mars, for example, is at 35 million miles when it is at its closest, (at its farthest, it is around 235 million miles), which sounds very far away, but it would only take about 150 days to get there. Compare it to other planets, such as one confusingly known as “oGle-2005-BlG-390lb”, which is more than 20 thousand light years away!
let’s take a little while to learn more about the incredible worlds around us.
The Planets that Are
Mercury
This is the closest planet to the Sun.
The name comes after a roman god. according to roman mythology, Mercury (known to the Greeks as hermes) was the fastest of all the gods. This fits the planet very well, since it has the quickest year of all the planets in the Solar System (88 days).
You can often see it from earth, though it can only be seen when the sun is rising or setting.
even though it doesn’t have any moons, it looks much like our moon.
Greek astronomers used to think that it was actually two different planets (the one seen at sunrise was called apollo, and the one seen at sunset was called hermes).
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