Planet Mug NEPTUNE

NEPTUNE. (Shown in true colour) Dark, cold, and whipped by supersonic winds, ice giant Neptune is the eighth and most distant planet in our solar system. With a radius of 15,299.4 miles (24,622 kilometres), Neptune is about four times wider than Earth. If Earth were the size of a nickel, Neptune would be about as big as a baseball. Neptune has at least five main rings and four prominent ring arcs that we know of so far. From an average distance of 2.8 billion miles (4.5 billion kilometres), Neptune is 30 astronomical units away from the Sun. One astronomical unit (abbreviated as AU), is the distance from the Sun to Earth. From this distance, it takes sunlight 4 hours to travel from the Sun to Neptune. One day on Neptune takes about 16 hours (the time it takes for Neptune to rotate or spin once). And Neptune makes a complete orbit around the Sun (a year in Neptunian time) in about 165 Earth years (60,190 Earth days). Neptune has 14 known moons. Neptune's largest moon is Triton. Triton is the only large moon in the solar system that circles its planet in a direction opposite to the planet's rotation (a retrograde orbit), which suggests that it may once have been an independant object that Neptune captured. Triton is extremely cold, with surface temperatures around minus 391 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 235 degrees Celsius). And yet, despite this deep freeze at Triton, Voyager 2 discovered geysers spewing icy material upward more than 5 miles (8 kilometres). Triton's thin atmosphere, also discovered by Voyager, has been detected from Earth several times since, and is growing warmer, but scientists do not yet know why.