During the solar eclipse earlier this week, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) told a group of high school students that the moon is a “planet” that is “made up mostly of gasses” and that the sun is “almost impossible to go near.” While the former leader of the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee has faced heavy criticism for her gaffe, The Gas Lamp decided to look back on the Congresswoman’s most absurd claims about our solar system and compile ‘Sheila Jackson Lee’s Guide To The Solar System’.

• Our solar system actually has 23 planets. 

  • A little known fact Jackson Lee learned as a teenager working a summer job in the Dr. Pepper factory, the popular soda’s claim to having 23 unique flavors was inspired by the 23 planets in the solar system. 

• Saturn is shaped like a sedan.

• That’s why General Motors created Saturn cars, dummy. In fact, for a brief period in the mid-90’s, all Saturn cars were made from materials found on the planet Saturn for a cross-promotional campaign with NASA to inspire young people to become interested in space. 

• Pluto isn’t real. 

• Not just like, not a planet anymore. But a hoax made up by President Herbert Hoover to try and distract America from the rise of communism in Asia.

• Uranus is big, brown, and smells like poop. 

• Why else would they name it after a butthole?

• The first person to visit Mars was a black person.

• Elon Musk is gaslighting the world by making it seem like he is going to be the first person to visit Mars and simultaneously whitewashing history by ignoring the fact that Frederick Reginald Thompson set foot on the red planet in 1947.

• Black holes are the reason daylight savings time exists. 

• According to Jackson Lee, the Earth passes through a black hole twice a year which adjusts the clock by one hour - a fact she learned when she won a sweepstake to meet a heavily medicated Albert Einstein on his deathbed at just five years old. 

• Neptune is covered in thousands of gigantic tridents.

• Each one is roughly the size of the Empire State Building, which makes it nearly impossible to land there, hence why mankind hasn’t yet visited.

• Jupiter is actually the smallest planet in the solar system. 

• While most believe that Jupiter is the largest planet, true astrophiles like Jackson Lee know that Galileo Galilei had a massive inferiority complex and constantly tried to overcompensate by exaggerating the size of things. 

• The Sun has spots because it gets too stressed out sometimes. 

• Bad skin happens to all of us. Even the driving life force of our solar system.