If one is a space traveler coming to the periphery of the Milky Galaxy, one will encounter a solar system which has ten planets. These planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and Sedna. Planet Earth is easily seen as the third planet revolving around the sun. It is a terrestrial planet and appears bright blue. Aside from these easily seen characteristics here are more interesting Earth facts.

• The name Earth is traced to the Anglo-Saxon language. Unlike the names of other planets, Earth is not part of either Greek or Roman mythology. Earth’s original name was Erda or Erdaz, which means ground or soil. It was later changed to Eorthe or simply Erth. Other names for Earth includes Terra (Latin), Jorda (Norwegian), Jord (Icelandic), Ereds (Aramaic), Eretz (Hebrew), and Era (Greek)

• Earth is estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old. It is as old as all the other members of the solar system, such as the sun and the planets. One of the most accepted theories is that Earth, along with the whole solar system, was created when stardust was aggregated by strong gravitational forces.

• Earth, today, is almost spherical in shape but the equator is wider. The equatorial circumference is 40,076 km while the polar circumference is 40,005 km. The equatorial radius was measured to be 6,378 km while the polar radius is 6,357 km. The total volume is extremely large, 1,086,781,292,542 cubic km. And if one hopes to carry Earth, one will be shouldering 5.97k x 1024 kilograms or 6 x 1021 metric tons.

• Earth makes one complete revolution around the sun in precisely 365.256 days. And this is at the dizzying speed of 29.79 km per second or 107,870 km per hour. While moving around the sun along its orbit, the Earth makes one complete rotation around its axis in 23.9345 hours. Another unique thing about Earth is that its axis is tilted at 23.45 degrees.

• Traveling with Earth are several artificial and no-longer-working satellites and one big moon. But the moon is not the only natural satellite of Earth. At present, there are about five space objects which orbits are influenced by Earth.

• On planet Earth, one will find that the must abundant elements are oxygen, silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, sodium, potassium, magnesium, nickel, and carbon. Most of these elements are not in its pure form but in compounds with other elements.

• There are seven known continents on Earth. These are North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Antarctica, and Australia. But sometimes, the North America and South America is combined into one continent, America, and the Europe and Asia are combined into Eurasia. This reduces the continents to five.