30 Amazing facts about Outer Space
1) 1.3 million number of Earths could fit inside the sun.
2) The exact speed of the photon particles (light) in vacuum is 299,792,458 m/s. 300,000,000 m/s is the round off speed so that we can learn and can do calculations with it easily.
3) The universe is so huge that to measure it the unit if “light years” is used. This is the distance traveled by light in a year. 1 light year = 9,454,254,955,488,000 m or 9,454,254,955,488 km.
4) The surface temperature of the sun is about 5,500 degrees centigrade and at the center it is about 15 million degrees centigrade.
5) There is no life possible on asteroids because they are very small in size so the gravitational force is very weak and as a result, the asteroids cannot maintain a fixed shape.
6) One day the sun will consume the Earth. The sun will continue to burn about 4.5 billion years. During this time, it will expand to such a size that it will engulf Mercury, Venus and Earth.
7) The energy created by the sun’s core is nuclear fusion. This huge amount of energy is produced when four hydrogen nuclei are combined into one helium nucleus.
8) The sun is almost a perfect sphere. Considering the sheer size of the sun, there is only a difference of 10 km in its polar and equatorial diameters – this makes it the closest thing to be a perfect sphere in the nature.
9) The sun is travelling at the speed of 220 km per second. It takes the sun approximately 225 – 250 million years to complete on orbit of the center of the milky way.
10) The Sun rotates in the opposite direction to the Earth. The Sun rotates from west to east instead of east to west like Earth.
11) Our milky way galaxy is a barred spiral galaxy about 120,000 light years in diameter containing up to 400 billion stars and possibly just as many planets.
12) Starburst is the name for galaxies that form a lot of new stars at a fast rate, usually after much molecular cloud is produced as two galaxies merge.
13) Most galaxies are between 1,000 and 10,000 parsecs in diameter. A parsec is an astronomical unit of length. To put the number into perspective, one parsec is equivalent to 31 trillion kilometers.
14) Most galaxies in the universe are actually dwarf galaxies. These galaxies are relatively small when compared to other galaxies – roughly one hundredth the size of the Milky Way with only a few billion stars.
15) The most distant galaxy ever discovered is the ‘GN-z11’, which is approximately 32 billion light years away.
16) Some smallest galaxies in the Universe contains only a few hundred or a few thousand stars (Compared with approximately 100 billion or more stars in the Milky Way).
17) Most galaxies have a black hole at the center, astronomers have found that the mass of that black hole is consistently about 1/1000 th mass of the host galaxy.
18) The dust can really travel too. Some galaxies drive galactic winds, expelling dust and gas at hundreds of kilometers per second into the intergalactic medium (the space between galaxies).
19) In about 4.5 billion years, the Milky Way will merge with the Andromeda galaxy (the largest galaxy in the local group). The result of the merging process will be an ellipsoidal galaxy nicknamed ‘Milkomeda’.
20) Mercury and Venus are the only 2 planets in the solar system that have not moons. In total, there are 176 moons discovered that orbits the planets in the solar system.
21) Enceladus, one of the Saturn’s moons, reflects 90% of the sunlight it receives. Because Enceladus’ icy surface reflects most of the sunlight, temperature reaches as low as -201 degrees celsius.
22) The highest mountain ever discovered is the Olympus Moons, which is located on mars and having a height of about 16 miles.
23) The Whirpool galaxy (M51) was the first celestial object identified as spiral.
24) The Sun weighs about 330,000 times more than the Earth. Its diameter is about 109 times the diameter of the Earth.
25) Footprints of the astronauts left on the moon will not disappear as there is no wind to blow them away.
26) Because of the lower gravity, a person who weighs 220 lbs on Earth would weigh 84 lbs on Mars.
27) There are 79 known Moon orbiting Jupiter. Jupiter is the planet in the Solar System with the most Moons, and also has the largest Moon in our Solar System.
28) The largest Moon in the Solar System is named Ganymede and it is 5,262 km in diameter. It is bigger than Mercury and visible with just a pair of binoculars.
29) The Sun makes a full rotation once every 25-35 days.
30) Earth is the only planet in in our solar system that is not named after a god. All the planets in the Solar System are named after gods.