• Question: What is your favourite planet?

    Asked by Ultimate Portal Master to Stephen, Hannah, Lucy, Phil, rochellevelho on 6 Mar 2017. This question was also asked by monkey is here.
    • Photo: Stephen Pulker

      Stephen Pulker answered on 6 Mar 2017:

      Earth, because I live there 😉 . . . Seriously, Mars because I spend so much of my time thinking about it I feel like I’ve been there.

    • Photo: Phil Sutton

      Phil Sutton answered on 8 Mar 2017:

      My Favorite planet in our solar system is Saturn purely because the large rings make it so unique in comparison to other planets. I like that we can still watch the rings as they evolve and form new moons all the time. It can help us understand how the planets themselves may have formed.

      Another of my favorite planets is Kepler-16b. This planet is the size of Saturn but orbits around the outside of two stars in what we call a circumbinary orbit. This planet is a real life example of some of the exotic worlds we regularly see in sci-fi movies. The most interesting thing though is this planet can have a large Earth like moon in orbit around that is in a location to be habitable to life. Imagine how the seasons, weather and sky would look on one of its moons.

    • Photo: Lucy Kissick

      Lucy Kissick answered on 8 Mar 2017:

      My favourite planet right now is Pluto, because when NASA’s spacecraft flew past in 2015 everyone was so shocked and excited by what they found! Pluto should have been so cold and small that it was geologically dead, but its surface has glaciers, and mountains made of water ice, and a great frozen ocean of methane and nitrogen. To me the discovery showed how even our own solar system is still full of surprises — how weird and wonderful might other solar systems be?

      And yes, yes, Pluto isn’t technically a planet: it’s a ‘dwarf planet’ because of it’s odd orbit and other characteristics. But I think classifications lose meaning beyond a point — it’s certainly the least interesting fact about Pluto.

    • Photo: Hannah Sargeant

      Hannah Sargeant answered on 16 Mar 2017:

      My favourite planet is Venus because it is most unlike the other planets. It spins in the opposite direction to the others and it is hotter than Mercury even though it is further away from the Sun. This is because of Venus’s atmosphere which has a crazy greenhouse effect which makes it super hot and made of acid! That’s why our machines that go to Venus only last a few hours before they melt…

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