Earth Facts I

The average radius of the Earth is 6371 km (3957 miles) - "average" because, of course, the Earth isn´t really perfectly round. It is about 150 million kilometers (93 million miles) from the Sun, a good trivia point to remember if you´re ever on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire"!

Big Bang

The "Big Bang" is the hypothesis scientists like best that explains how our universe would have come into being. According to the Big Bang, there was first a small volumen of very hot matter which had tremendous energy. The matter exploded 15 to 20 billion years ago, and began to expand and to cool. Cooling is a relative term, because temperatures after the first minute are thought to have been about a billion degrees. How did the matter get there to begin with? No one knows!

James Hutton

For many years most folks thought that the Earth evolved through a series of catastrophes, like Noah´s Flood. That formed the basis for a theory called "Catastrophism". Then James Hutton (1726 - 1797) a gentlemen farmer and naturalist, suggested that the processes he saw at work around him, for example, a stream eroding its banks, could have caused the Earth to look the way it did, without any catastrophes - if the processes were at work long enough, that is. His theory, called "uniformitarianism," stated that "the present is the key to the past." Because of his insights into earth processes he is often called the "Father of Modern Geology."

Galaxy Facts

There are about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, which is the galaxy that includes our own solar system. The Milky-Way is a flat, pancake-shape galaxy that is slowly revolving through space.