Guided tour · 7 stops
🔥 Fire and ice
The most extreme places: hotter, colder, higher, stormier.
- Hottest of all: the Sun
In the Sun's core the temperature is 15 million degrees. Its outer layer, the corona, is more than a million degrees – mysteriously, much hotter than the surface.
- The hottest planet
Although Mercury is closer to the Sun, Venus is the hottest planet: its greenhouse effect keeps it at around 465 degrees day and night. The air pressure is the same as 900 metres down in the sea.
- The most volcanoes: Io
On Jupiter's moon Io, more than 400 active volcanoes are bubbling away. Their fountains shoot hundreds of kilometres high. It is all driven by Jupiter's tremendous tidal forces.
- The highest mountain: Olympus Mons
The volcano Olympus Mons on Mars is around 22 kilometres high – almost three times as high as Mount Everest and as wide as France.
- The fastest winds
On Neptune, storms sweep along at over 2,000 kilometres per hour – almost twice the speed of sound on Earth. Where the energy comes from so far from the Sun is still not fully understood.
- The highest cliff
On Uranus's moon Miranda stands a cliff face up to 20 kilometres high. Because gravity is so weak, a fall from the top would take around 12 minutes.
- Coldest of all: Triton
On Neptune's moon Triton, minus 235 degrees has been measured – the coldest surface ever measured. Even so, geysers there spit nitrogen high into the sky.
In the 3D model the camera flies from stop to stop. The narrator’s voice is computer-generated.
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