Amazing Facts about Space Only Astronomers Know
1) Astronomers
have found a massive reservoir of water in space. The largest ever detected and it's also the farthest 12 billion
light-years away from us.
The water vapor cloud holds 140 trillion times as much water as all
the Earth's oceans combined.
2) Venus spins at its own unhurried pace a full rotation takes 243 Earth days and it takes the planet a bit less than 225 Earth days to go all the way around the Sun, it means a day on Venus is longer than a year.
3) There are ten thousands of black holes at the center of our home Milky Way galaxy. Hundreds of them are paired with a star and nearly 10,000 are isolated ones. Black holes are impossible to spot because light can't escape from them. Astronomers can only track them down with the help of x-rays or by estimating their gravitational pull.
4) You can see solar eclipses because even though the moon is 400 times smaller than the Sun it's also 400 times closer to earth, so it's perfectly capable of obscuring the star but in 50 million years the moon won't be able to block the Sun completely because of the satellites changing orbit.
5) The highest mountain in the solar system is Olympus Mons on Mars. It's 3 times as high as Mount Everest, the Earth's highest mountain above sea level. If you were standing on top of Olympus Mons, you wouldn't understand you were standing on a mountain. It’s slopes would be hidden by the planet's curvature.
6) A full NASA spacesuit costs an unbelievable twelve million dollars. 70% of this hefty sum is for the control module and backpack.
7) Outer space is not a perfect vacuum, it contains not only stars and planets but also clouds of interstellar dust, space plasma and cosmic rays those are atom fragments dashing from the outskirts of the solar system.
8) One phenomenon people should be worried about while exploring space is cold welding. If two pieces of the same kind of metal touch in space they bond and get permanently stuck together. It doesn't happen on earth since water and air keep pieces separate.
9) Astronauts on board the International Space Station do not use their feet to walk, they float around. So in orbit the skin on their feet becomes very soft and starts to peel off. That's why they have to take their socks off very carefully. Otherwise skin cells will break free and float around in the almost weightless environment.
10) Earthquakes on the moon or more correctly moon-quakes are not something from science fiction. It happens closer to the center of the satellite. Scientists think moon-quakes might be caused by the gravity of Earth and the Sun.
11) One of the moons of Saturn Rhea might have a ring system consisting of 3 narrow bands. If astronomers managed to confirm it, it will be the first time people discovered rings around a moon.
12) ‘Normal visible matter’for example, planets and stars makes up just 5% of the universe. The rest consists of invisible dark energy that's 68% and dark matter about 27%, add it up and there's 95% of space we know nothing about.
14) If the Sun was the size of a front door, our planet would be the size of a nickel. In other words the Sun could fit more than 1 million Earth's.
Moon rocks have a super slow erosion rate about 0.04 inches for every 1 million years. That's why the Apollo astronauts’ footprints left on the moon are likely to stay there for 10 to 100 million years.
15) Jupiter's moon Io is four-and-a-half billion years old, almost as old as the planet itself. It's one of the very few bodies in the solar system with active volcanoes and these volcanoes are powerful enough to produce spectacular views that are later captured by Earth's telescopes.
16) A
neutron star gets born after a supernova collapses. After birth it rotates extremely fast
about 60 times per second but this rate can sometimes grow up to 600 times per
second.
17) Space isn't supposed to be black, there are stars everywhere. You don't see stars wherever you look because some of them haven't existed long enough for their light to reach earth.
18) Saturn is not the only planet that has rings. Gas giants Uranus, Neptune and Jupiter have rings of their own but they are thin and almost impossible to see.
19) NASA can convert plasma waves, radio waves and magnetic fields into audio tracks and listen to what's happening in space. They record all kinds of intriguing sounds from beeps - ambulance. At the same time space itself is an eerily silent place, there are some sound waves and vibrations but people can't perceive them.
20) Chariklo is a tiny celestial body orbiting the Sun between Saturn and Uranus in the outer solar system. Just 157 miles across it is not a planet but it has two rings of it's own.
21) One of the things Jupiter famous for it’s Great Red Spot, a giant spinning storm. This phenomenon used to be so gigantic that it could fit two or even 3 Earths but the spot is shrinking, right now it wouldn't fit more than one earth.
22) Astronomers have found out the real hue of a planet orbiting another star for the first time. HD189733b has a beautiful azure color. The reason might be molten glass rain falling down on the planet, it scatters blue light in the atmosphere. The planet might look like Earth from a distance but it's a gas giant orbiting very close to it’s star. The temperature on the planet rises higher than 1800℉.
23) The only asteroid belt in the solar system astronomers know about is between Mars and Jupiter. There are thousands of asteroids in this area. They are irregularly shaped solid objects of different sizes but all of them are way smaller than a planet.
24) The ocean on Jupiter is larger than any other in the solar system but unlike Earth's oceans. It's made not of water but of metallic hydrogen. The ocean’s depth is a mind-blowing 25,000 miles, it's almost the same as the distance around the earth.
25) Scientists have analyzed the chemical content of some meteorites found in the Sahara Desert, Antarctica, and other places. Some of the rocks turned out to have Martian origin. Others arrived from the moon or the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
26) Earth gets more energy from the Sun in one hour than people spend in one year. During the past 15 years, we have started using 20% more solar energy. It might seem like a big deal but it's just 0.7% of the amount of energy humans use every year.
27) Venus is infamous for its powerful winds. At the cloud tops they blow 50 times faster than the planet rotates. These fierce winds never stop and can get even stronger with time.
28) The largest canyon in the solar system Valles Marineris on Mars is more than ten times larger than the Earth's Grand Canyon. Some astronomers believe that the canyon appeared billions of years ago when the planet was cooling down.
29) The Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy are going to meet in 3.75 billion years. They are moving towards each other at a breakneck speed. When the two galaxies collide, they will form a huge elliptical galaxy.
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