Intro

Hello and Welcome to this episode of the podcast, "The Mnemonic Tree", where we add a single mnemonic leaf, to our Tree of Knowledge.

Today's episode, is on one of the oldest mnemonics that has always served me well when wishing to remember the order of the planets. However, since Pluto was reclassified back in 2006 the mnemonic has now been slightly modified and truncated.

I along with millions of people were outraged when Pluto was demoted, thinking it was akin, to saying your son, was now adopted and he needs to go fend for himself! Surely there’s enough “space” up there for this fascinating little planet.

Anyway, after that little rant today’s mnemonic will be on the eight planets in our solar system. I promise all listeners we will do the five dwarf planets of the solar system at a later date.

With that being said, we will begin with a summary from Wikipedia.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Planets_and_dwarf_planets_of_the_Solar_System,_sizes_to_scale.png

Wikipedia Summary

The Solar System[c] is the gravitationally bound system of the Sun and the objects that orbit it. It formed 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of a giant interstellar molecular cloud. The vast majority (99.86%) of the system's mass is in the Sun, with most of the remaining mass contained in the planet Jupiter. The planetary system around the Sun contains eight planets. The four inner system planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars—are terrestrial planets, being composed primarily of rock and metal. The four giant planets of the outer system are substantially larger and more massive than the terrestrials. The two largest, Jupiter and Saturn, are gas giants, being composed mainly of hydrogen and helium; the next two, Uranus and Neptune, are ice giants, being composed mostly of volatile substances with relatively high melting points compared with hydrogen and helium, such as water, ammonia, and methane. All eight planets have nearly circular orbits that lie near the plane of Earth's orbit, called the ecliptic.

There are an unknown number of smaller dwarf planets and innumerable small Solar System bodies orbiting the Sun.[d] Six of the major planets, the six largest possible dwarf planets, and many of the smaller bodies are orbited by natural satellites, commonly called "moons" after Earth's Moon. Two natural satellites, Jupiter's moon Ganymede and Saturn's moon Titan, are larger than Mercury, the smallest terrestrial planet, though less massive, and Jupiter's moon Callisto is nearly as large. Each of the giant planets and some smaller bodies are encircled by planetary rings of ice, dust and moonlets. The asteroid belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, contains objects composed of rock, metal and ice. Beyond Neptune's orbit lie the Kuiper belt and scattered disc, which are populations of objects composed mostly of ice and rock.

In the outer reaches of the Solar System lies a class of minor planets called detached objects. There is considerable debate as to how many such objects there will prove to be.[9] Some of these objects are large enough to have rounded under their own gravity and thus to be categorized as dwarf planets. Astronomers generally accept about nine objects as dwarf planets: the asteroid Ceres, the Kuiper-belt objects Pluto, Orcus, Haumea, Quaoar, and Makemake, and the scattered-disc objects Gonggong, Eris, and Sedna.[d] Various small-body populations, including comets, centaurs and interplanetary dust clouds, freely travel between the regions of the Solar System.

The solar wind, a stream of charged particles flowing outwards from the Sun, creates a bubble-like region of interplanetary medium in the interstellar medium known as the heliosphere. The heliopause is the point at which pressure from the solar wind is equal to the opposing pressure of the interstellar medium; it extends out to the edge of the scattered disc. The Oort cloud, which is thought to be the source for long-period comets, may also exist at a distance roughly a thousand times further than the heliosphere. The Solar System is located 26,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way galaxy in the Orion Arm, which contains most of the visible stars in the night sky. The nearest stars are within the so-called Local Bubble, with the closest, Proxima Centauri, at 4.2441 light-years.

Extracted from: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System]

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1e6m_comparison_Mars_Mercury_Moon_Pluto_Haumea_-_no_transparency.png

Mnemonic

8 Planets of the Solar System Mnemonic - My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos

(Picture your mum representing all the 8 planets in order, using nachos on a big plate)

1. Mercury

2. Venus

3. Earth

4. Mars

5. Jupiter

6. Saturn

7. Uranus

8. Neptune

Five Fun Facts

1. The nearest black hole is 1,600 light-years away, and is approximately ten times larger than our sun.

Now just speaking of black holes, tragically on a recent mission an astronaut got sucked into a black hole. Now when a NASA official explained this to the widow, that her husband was spaghettified, which is the technical term for being sucked into a black hole and stretched and ripped apart, the widow said "What do you mean he was spaghettified?"

And the NASA official, now aware of his overly graphic and upsetting parlance replied “Yeah, I’m sorry your husband pasta way!”

2. Mercury, the closest planet to the sun does in fact have ice. It is found in the permanently shadowed craters near the poles.

3. Saturn has the most moons. The figure at the moment is 83 moons of which 63 are confirmed and 20 are awaiting confirmation of discovery and official naming.

4. Venus is the hottest planet. The thick atmosphere traps heat creating a greenhouse effect, with the surface temperature hot enough to melt lead!

5. Neptune takes the longest for a single orbit around the sun at a whopping 164.8 earth years, and Mercury has the shortest orbit around the sun, at only 88 earth days.