Back To Wild

In Roman mythology, Pluto is the god of the underworld. The planet received this name perhaps because it’s so far from the Sun that it is in eternal darkness.

Pluto was discovered in 1930 by a lucky accident. Calculations which later turned out to be in error had predicted a planet beyond Neptune, based on the motions of Uranus and Neptune. Not knowing of the error, Clyde W. Tombaugh at Lowell Observatory in Arizona did a very careful sky survey which turned up Pluto anyway.

• Of all the planets in the Solar System Pluto is the smallest planet.

• It is smaller than Earth’s Moon, and half the width of Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede.

• Pluto moves around the Sun on a diverse plain than the other 8 planets, going over them and below them.

• Pluto’s orbit is oval, which means that it can come closer to the Sun than Neptune, but then go almost two billion kilometers further away from Neptune’s orbit.

• Pluto has one moon, Charon. This moon is not much smaller than Pluto itself. No other moon is as close to the size of its planet as Charon is to Pluto.

• Pluto’s journey around the Sun takes 248 Earth years. This means that, since its discovery in 1930, it still has 177 years to go until it has made a complete orbit around the Sun.

• Pluto is the only planet in the Solar System which has not been explored by any space probe.

• Pluto is the planet with the lowest pull of gravity in the Solar System. This explains why its moon, Charon, moves around the planet so closely.

• A day on Pluto lasts for 6 days and 9 hours, which mean that it has the second slowest speed of rotation in the Solar System.

• No one knows what Pluto’s atmosphere contains, or even if it has an atmosphere. Any atmosphere is most likely to contain nitrogen.

According to the Roman mythology, Saturn is the god of agriculture. The related Greek god, Cronus, was the son of Uranus and Gaia and the father of Zeus (Jupiter). Saturn is the basis of the English word “Saturday”.

Saturn has been well-known since primitive times. The first person to observe it with a telescope was Galileo; he noted its anomalous form but was puzzled by it. Early annotations of Saturn were convoluted by the fact that the Earth passes through the plane of Saturn’s rings every few years as Saturn moves in its orbit.

A low resolution image of Saturn therefore changes considerably. It was not until 1659 that Christiaan Huygens rightly inferred the geometry of the rings. Saturn’s rings remained unique in the known solar system until 1977 when very faint rings were discovered around Uranus (and shortly thereafter around Jupiter and Neptune).

• In the solar system Saturn has the most number of moons, including Titan, a moon with an ambiance possibly similar to Earth’s billions of years ago.

• Saturn is a faintly smaller version of Jupiter, with alike, but less idiosyncratic, surface patterns.

• The main difference between Saturn and Jupiter is its amazing rings.

• Saturn’s rings are believed to be the particles of an old moon destroyed in a collision about 50 million years ago.

• It is assumed that Saturn’s rings will vanish one day. They will either dissolve into space or get sucked into the planet by its pull of gravity.

• Saturn is twice as far away from the Sun as Jupiter is.

• Saturn is the second biggest planet in the Solar System after Jupiter. It is so huge that Earth could fit into it 755 times.
• A year on Saturn would take almost thirty Earth years.

Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and by far the largest. Jupiter is more than twice as immense as all the other planets combined. And that is approximately 318 times of the Earth. Jupiter is the fourth brightest object in the sky after the Sun, the Moon and Venus at some times Mars is also brighter. Galileo’s discovery, in 1610, of Jupiter’s four large moons Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto was the first discovery of a center of movement not actually centered on the Earth.

Facts

• Jupiter has a fluid metal ocean at its centre, surrounded by thousands of kilometers of hydrogen and helium gas.
• Its famous Red Spot is in reality a great storm that has raged for at least four hundred years.
• Jupiter has a thin set of rings, which is barely visible from Earth.
• This planet is considered as the vacuum cleaner of the Solar System because it sucks in comets, asteroids and meteorites which could be on a collision course for Earth.
• Jupiter takes only 9 hours and 55 minutes to spin on its axis. This means a day on Jupiter is less than 10 hours long. Its fast rotary motion causes the planet to be compressed, being wider at the equator than from North to South.
• Jupiter is the planet with the strongest pull of gravity in the Solar System.
• The only other object in the Solar System with a stronger pull of gravity is the Sun.
• Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede, is the biggest moon in the Solar System.
• Jupiter’s gravity is used to catapult space-craft on deep space missions further away. This is how the Voyager missions of 1975 managed to succeed.

The fossilized remnants of six baby dinosaurs that died in a volcanic mudflow have been found in China. According to researchers the dinosaurs were less than four years old, and most likely formed a “crèche” composed of babies from at least two different clutches.

The Psittacosaurus finding indicates that the animals had started forming social groups much earlier than previously thought. The 120-million-year-old fossils are reported in the journal Palaeontology. Research on the group was led by Dr Paul Barrett, from London’s Natural History Museum.

He said “the specimens are spectacularly well preserved and together offer a unique insight into the behavior of the Psittacosaurus, which sported a parrot-like beak”.

Dr Barrett explained “It was discovered that these animals in fact lived in small groups. Another interesting fact is that not only did these animals live in groups but these groups were made up of individuals from different sets of clutches”.

It is this proof of grouping in Psittacosaurus that persuades Dr Barrett that the dinosaur was an innately social creature. The horns that came later in its flashier descendent, the iconic Triceratops, perhaps evolved for mating rituals rather than as a protection to push away predators such as T. Rex.

The Psittacosaurus herd was dig up from the Yixian Formation in the northeast of the People’s Republic of China. These are the same bases that have produced the famous “feathered dinosaurs”.

In Peru Archaeologists have found 40 mummies which are 1,200-year-old. Chachapoyas culture in the Amazon fortress of Kuelap, project leader Alfredo Narvaez told local media on Wednesday.

He said that the mummies were found together with Inca pottery, and that they indicated signs of being affected by a fire in the archaeological complex, some 1,409 km northeast to the nation’s capital.

Narvaez said the bodies were buried under a platform of 24 meters in diameter in the El

Tintero structure during a dig of the Kuelap Archaeological Complex Restoration and Conservation project.

El Tintero enclosed six circular buildings, which seemed to be homes to the inhabitants of that time. The mummies, of men and women of all ages, were found inside and outside the buildings. Narvaez said that it seemed that there was no time to bury them.

According to the reports the mummies may have been victims of a pandemic or a brutal assault which ended in a mass execution and the burning of the stone fort.

The Chachapoyas, who were one of the superior cultures of ancient Peru, had settlements from the Mara and Urubamba River to Abiseo Basin with a capital in the Utcubamba Basin, in the current Amazonas region.

The Chachapoyas stone fort, which is about 3,000 meters above sea level, was built in the year 800 A.D. It occupies six hectares and has three defense platforms.

The scientific name of the white winged wood duck is Cairina scutulata. It is mostly found in countries like Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam.

The male and female have a white head and neck which is spotted with black. The bill is orange, dappled with black. The wings are tipped with white. The male is more colored than the female and the female is smaller than the male. Single birds or pairs are most commonly seen, but sometimes groups form around waterholes in the dry season.

They live in pools and marshes in dense, swampy forest where they depend on trees for roosting and nesting. The White-winged Duck is very secretive and feeds mostly at night on seeds, grain, rice, snails frogs and fish hence they are omnivores by nature.

Their mating display is very simple. The male swims with his neck arched and stretched forward making pumping motions. This is rarely answered by the female.

Females lay up to 15 greenish-yellow eggs in a hole in a tree, a forked branch, or hollow trunk. The eggs are incubated for around 30 days. The chicks are dark brown with lighter under parts. They fledge after about 14 weeks.

This species depends on swampland and forest, two of the most threatened habitats on the planet. In the past there may have been as many as 500,000 of these birds. Now only a few thousand remain and numbers are still declining. The conservation status of these birds is endangered.