· The Sun is always losing weight, in fact scientists have worked out that it loses around 4 Million tonnes every second, this is the amount of hydrogen gas that the sun turns into energy every second.
· If the Sun became a Black Hole, it would be only a few kilometers across but it could swallow the Earth.
· Every Star would explode if the Gravity did not hold its material together.
· The Moon is moving slowly away from the Earth at the rate of 3cm per year.
· From Edge To Edge the Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across.
· A Human being living on Neptune would never live for one "Neptune Year". The Neptune Year is the time it takes Neptune to travel once around the sun.(165 Earth Days).
· The universe extents from the Earth for at least 10 Billion Light Years and its probably still expanding.
· A day in Mercury lasts approximately as long as 59 days on earth.
· The opposite of black holes are estimated to be white holes which spray out matter and light like fountains.
· The swirling gases around a black hole turn it into an electrical generator, making it spout jets of electricity billions of kilometers out into space.
· Matter spiraling into a black hole is torn apart and glows so brightly that it creates the brightest objects in the Universe – quasars.
· If you fell into a black hole, you would stretch like spaghetti.
· The Universe may have neither a centre nor an edge, because according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, gravity bends all of space time around into an endless curve.
· One problem with working out the age of the Universe is that there are stars in our galaxy which are thought to be 14 to 18 billion years old – older than the estimated age of the Universe. So, either the stars must be younger, or the Universe older.
· Glowing nebulae are named so because they give off a dim, red light, as the hydrogen gas in them is heated by radiation from the nearby stars.
· The gloves included in the space suit have silicon rubber fingertips which allow the astronaut some sense of touch.
· Oxygen is circulated around the helmet in space suits in order to prevent the visor from misting.
· Life is known to exist only on Earth, but in 1986 NASA found what they thought might be fossils of microscopic living things in a rock from Mars.
· Twice during Mercury’s orbit, it gets so close to the Sun and speeds so much that the Sun seems to go backwards in the sky.
· From the moon, astronauts brought back 380 kg of Moon rock.
· Spacecrafts have double hulls (outer coverings) which protect them against other space objects that crash into them.
· Spacecrafts toilets have to get rid of waste in low gravity conditions, Astronauts have to sit on a device which sucks away the waste. Solid waste is dried and dumped in space, but the water is saved.
· The lower a satellite’s orbit, the faster it must fly to avoid falling back to the Earth. Most satellites fly in low orbits, 300 km from the earth.
· Mars’s volcano Olympus Mons is the biggest in the solar system. It covers the same area as Ireland and is three times higher than our Mount Everest.
· The first successful planetary space probe was the USA’s Mariner 2, which flew past Venus in 1962.
· Pulsars probably result from a supernova explosion - that is why most are found in the flat disc of the Milky Way, where supernovae occur.
· The largest moon in the Solar System is the Jupiter’s moon Ganymede.
· In April 2001, Dennis Tito became the first space tourist, ferried up to the ISS by the Russian Soyuz space shuttle.
· In summer in Uranus, the sun does not set for 20 years. In winter, darkness lasts for 20 years. In autumn, the sun rises and sets every 9 hours.
· Ceres is the biggest asteroid in the Solar System –
940 km across, and 0.0002% the size of the earth.
· Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity (1905) shows that all measurements are relative, including time and speed. In other words, time and speed depends upon where you measure them.
· The nuclear fusion reactions in the Sun’s core send out billions of light photons every minute but they take 10 million years to reach its surface.
· The moon is the only other world that humans have set foot on. Because the moon has no atmosphere or wind, the footprints planted in its dusty surface in 1969 by the Apollo astronauts are still there today, perfectly preserved.
· Jupiter’s moon Europa may have oceans of water beneath its dry surface and it is a major target in the search for life in the Solar System.
· The Solar System has nine planets including Pluto, but Pluto may be an escaped moon or an asteroid not a planet.
· The earth actually takes 365.24219 days to orbit the Sun, which is called one Solar Year. To compensate for the missing 0.242 days, the western calendar adds an extra day in February every fourth (leap) year, but misses out three leap years every four centuries.
· The afterglow of the Big Bang can still be detected as microwave background radiation coming from all over space.
· The future of the Universe may depend on how much dark matter there is. If there is too much, its gravity will eventually stop the Universe’s expansion – and make it shrink again.
· Since the invention of the telescope, no supernovae have been observed within our galaxy. Supernovae were recorded in 1572 and 1604, while Hans Lippershey invented the telescope in 1608 and Galileo was the first to turn his telescope skyward in 1609.
· The Earth is rotating on its axis at a rate of 460 metres per second at the equator, and is orbiting the sun at a rate of about 30 kilometres per second. The sun is orbiting the centre of the Milky Way at a rate of about 220 kilometres per second. The Milky Way is moving at a speed of about 1000 kilometres per second towards a region of space 150 million light years away called the Great Attractor.
· A "light year" is a measure of distance, not time. It is defined as the distance light travels in one year. Light moves at a velocity of about 300,000 kilometres each second, so in one year, it travels about 9,500,000,000,000 kilometres.
· According to string theory, the universe has not just three or four dimensions, but eleven dimensions, ten of space and one of time. We do not observe the extra spatial dimensions because they are curled tightly around each other.
· The oldest galaxies we can see are right next door to us in the present universe. Looking out into space, we see images of galaxies that become younger and younger the further out we look. We actually see images of the youngest galaxies in the universe the farther out we look.
· The Moon's orbit (its circular path around the Earth) is indeed getting larger, at a rate of about 3.8 centimeters per year. (The Moon's orbit has a radius of 384,000 km.) The reason for the increase is that the Moon raises tides on the Earth. Because the side of the Earth that faces the Moon is closer, it feels a stronger pull of gravity than the center of the Earth. Similarly, the part of the Earth facing away from the Moon feels less gravity than the center of the Earth. This effect stretches the Earth a bit, making it a little bit oblong.
It is expected that in 15 billion years, the orbit will stabilize at 1.6 times its present size, and the Earth day will be 55 days long equal to the time it will take the Moon to orbit the Earth.
· Cosmic Latte is the color of the universe, according to a team of astronomers from Johns Hopkins University. In 2001, Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry determined that the color of the universe was a greenish white, but they soon corrected their analysis in "The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey: constraints on cosmic star-formation history from the cosmic spectrum", published in 2002. In this paper, they reported that their survey of the color of all light in the universe added up to a slightly beige white. The survey included more than 200,000 galaxies, and measured the spectral range of the light from a large volume of the universe. The hexadecimal RGB value for Cosmic Latte is #FFF8E7.
In a Washington Post article, the color was displayed. Glazebrook jokingly said that he was looking for suggestions for a name for the new color. Several people who read the article sent in suggestions. "Cosmic Latte" was selected.
· Now look at the sizes of some of the stars. They look so small that little children say "Twinkle, twinkle little star". The earth looks pretty large! It takes us many hours to get from one place to another on this earth. But the sun is so large that 1 million spheres the size of the earth could fit into it, if it were hollow. Yet even the sun is small compared to some stars. Some stars are so large that 500 million spheres the size of the sun could fit inside each of them if they were hollow.
· Let us consider the distances to some of the stars. The nearest star visible to the naked eye is a star called "Alpha Centauri" - which is four and a half light years away - that is, about 250,000 times the distance to the sun. This means that if you traveled at the speed of light, even though you would reach the moon in one and a half seconds and the sun in eight and a half minutes you would have to travel for four and a half years at that speed to reach "Alpha Centauri." To get a better idea of what this means, consider a scale model of the universe where the earth is represented by a grain of sand and the sun by a marble, 3 feet away from the earth. All the planets of our solar system would then come within a radius of 100 feet from the sun. But the nearest star would be 150 miles away from the earth on that scale model of the universe.
· Jupiter rotates on its axis (rotates) with amazing speed, giving rise to winds with speeds of hundreds of miles per hour in atmosphere. (Our earth rotates it 24 hours a day and 12 hours of the night 12-hour, day and night if jupiter how's that?)
· The tallest mountain in the Solar System is the mighty Olympus Mons on Mars. It rises up 27 kilometers above the surrounding plains. Olympus Mons is a shield volcano, like Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, and formed gradually over billions of years. Some lava flows on the volcano are so young that planetary scientists think that it might still be active.
Earth at night seen from our amazing space
· I come from Earth. I have lived here all my life.
· I love my home without question and I shall never find another place like it.
· People hate me, and people love me. I have both good and bad times.
· I am rewarded for loving the Earth and punished for hating it.
· Yet, still, the Earth forgives me.
· I love you Earth and I thank you for all that you have given me.
· We are all great until we kill our mother Earth.
· Comets are bodies of ice and dust. In orbit in the outer reaches of the Solar System they are dark and cold, but when they approach the Sun they heat up and release glowing tails of dust and gas blowing away from the Sun.
· Fragments of rock up to 1m (3ft) wide are called meteoroids. When they enter Earth’s atmosphere they burn up, producing showers of light called meteors or ‘shooting stars’.
· A space vehicle must move at a rate of 7 miles per second to escape the earth's Gravitational pull. This is equivalent to going from New York to Philadelphia in about twenty seconds.
· Astronomers believe that the universe contains one atom for every 88 gallons of space.
· Sun is not yellow. It is white. Our perception captures them as Yellow object because our atmosphere dilutes the sun’s real color light.
· Sun has destiny as a source of energy and killing power one day. Every year, sun is bigger, hotter and it keeps growing until it runs out of energy. In the next 4 to 6 billion years from now, Sun is probably not hanging on the horizon.
· There are only 8 planets there : Mercury, Venus, Earth,Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. That’s because the International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet in 2006. Why is Pluto not a planet? To qualify as a planet, an object needs to orbit the Sun, have enough mass to pull itself into a spherical shape, and have cleared out its orbit of other material. It’s this third requirement that Pluto hasn’t fulfilled, it’s just a fraction of the mass in its orbit, while the other planets are millions of times more massive than everything else in their orbits.One reason why Pluto is declassified as a planet is because asteroids has been detected in our solar system that are as large or larger than Pluto. Stricter rules are now in place as to what can be called a planet. Pluto did not meet all the new requirements to be labeled as one.Technically, Pluto's name is now 134340 after being declassified as a planet.
· Mars is red because it is rusty. There is a lot of iron in the soil, and the air on Mars has made it turn red-just like rusty iron on Earth.
· In 1996 NASA, while studying the ALH 84001 meteorite of Martian origin found in Antarctica in 1984, announced that fossilized micro-organisms from Mars might be present in it.
· In winter, nighttime temperatures on Mars can drop as low as -191°F.
· The sun would look like a bright star from Pluto, since they are so far away from each other.
· Saturn has over 30 known Satellites, but many of them are small and faint.
· Titan is the only Saturn Moon with an atmosphere.
· The Earth weighs 6,588,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons.
· It is believed that Venus used to have bodies of water similar to Earth, but dried up over a period of 300 million years when the sun began admitting more solar energy after the sun's infancy stage.
· Traveling at a speed of 186,000 miles per second, light takes 6 hours to travel from Pluto to Earth.
· When the Apollo 12 astronauts landed on the moon, the impact caused the moon's surface to vibrate for fifty-five minutes. The vibrations were picked up by laboratory instruments, leading geologists to theorize that the moon's surface is composed of many fragile layers of rocks.
· The acceleration, due to gravity on the Moon is 1/6th of the acceleration, due to gravity on earth's surface. Your mass of course will remain the same but your weight which is a measure of the pull of gravity will change on the Moon. So, if you weigh 72 kg on the Earth, then your weight will be only 12 kg on the moon.
· One of the interesting facts about the Moon is that a day on the moon lasts for a month and the night that follows also lasts for a month! During the day, temperature reaches 107oC and during the night it drops down to around -153oC.
· Normally, there are 12 'Full Moons' in a year. However, due to an accumulation of some extra 11 days every year, an extra 13th Full Moon occurs after 2 or three years. It is called a 'Blue Moon' giving rise to the popular phrase, wherein a rare event is called "Once in a Blue Moon" .
· 20th July 1969, marked a big leap in the history of mankind, as Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin became the first men to land on the Moon, through the Apollo 11 space mission.
· The Moon’s total surface area is 14,658,000 sq. mi (37,932,000 sq. km).
· Temperatures on the moon range from 253° F (123° C) to -387° F (-233° C) .
· The Sun is made up of 92% hydrogen, 7% helium and the remainder of various gasses.
· Radiations of the Sun are in two forms, electromagnetic (photons) and particle (electrons, protons, alpha particles, etc.) radiation.
· Most ancient civilizations have based their culture on the presence of the Sun. These include the myths as developed by the following people: Egyptians (Re or Ra), Aztecs (Tonatiuh and Huitzilopochtli), Greek (Helios), Inca (Inti), and the list goes on.
· Litter laws do not apply in outer space... there are around 10,000 pieces of equipment floating around our planet, part of which are working satellites, while the majority is made up of debris.
· The fundamental method of determining a star's distance involves measurement of its parallax, a concept used to find the distance to the Moon in most cases. Nearby stars are in what's called the elliptical plane, as the Earth orbits the Sun, both will appear to move back and forth against the background of more distant stars.
· The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy with a bulge at its centre and a surrounding spiral disc of stars, gas and dust.
· The entire galaxy rotates around a central axis. Since the dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago, the Sun is estimated to have travelled about a third the way around the Milky Way's centre.
· Based on Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, there are three possible shapes that the Universe may take: open, closed, and flat. Once again, measurements by WMAP on the CMBR have revealed a monumental confirmation – the Universe is flat.
· Current estimates as with regards to the size of the Universe pegs it at a width of 150 billion light years. Although it may seem peculiarly inconsistent with the age of the Universe, which you’ll read about next, this value is easily understood once you consider the fact that the Universe is expanding at an accelerated rate.
· The Milky Way consists of at least 200 and maybe as many as 400 billions stars. It is spread out as a thin disk, and from the outside it would look like a spiral galaxy. Recent evidence suggests that the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy; this is a type of spiral galaxy with a central bar-shaped structure consisting of stars. Barred spiral galaxies are common, and the bar structure is believed to be a stellar nursery fuelling star birth in the centres. The bar acts like a mechanism that channels gas inwards from the spiral arms towards the centre, and stars are born out of the interstellar cloud. It has been suggested that spiral galaxies without bars may suddenly develop them; the bars might come and go.
· Until 1962 it was thought that Mercury's "day" was the same length as its "year" so as to keep that same face to the Sun much as the Moon does to the Earth. But this was shown to be false in 1965 by doppler radar observations. It is now known that Mercury rotates three times in two of its years. Mercury is the only body in the solar system known to have an orbital/rotational resonance with a ratio other than 1:1 (though many have no resonances at all).
· Mercury has a small magnetic field whose strength is about 1% of Earth's.
· Mars has higher mountains, and deeper canyons than any other planet. The largest canyon on Mars would stretch from New York City to Los Angeles on the Earth. That makes the Grand Canyon look tiny. It also has the Solar System's biggest volcano, Olympus Mons, which is nearly 3 times larger than Mount Everest.
· Mars does not contain the ozone layer in its atmosphere; therefore, the sunrays damage a lot. Mars has most violent dust storms than any of other planet in the solar system. The first spacecraft to visit Mars was Mariner 4 which flew by in 1965. It took 22 pictures of Mars from a distance of ~6000 miles.
· The Sun makes up 99.86% of the solar system’s mass.
· The Universe has neither a center nor an edge, because according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, gravity bends all of space time around into an endless curve.
· The Star Alpha Herculis is twenty five times larger than the circumference described by the earth's revolution around the sun. This means that twenty five diameters of our solar orbit would have to be placed end to end to equal the diameter of this Star.
· All of the stars comprising the Milky Way galaxy revolve around the center of the galaxy once every 200 million years or so.
· Shoemaker-Levy 9 was a comet that fragmented and collided with Jupiter in July 1994. This event was highly publicised and gave scientists a great deal of information.
· Moon was Buzz Aldines mother’s maiden name. (Buzz Aldine was the second man on the moon).
· It takes about 1.25 seconds for moonlight to reach the Earth.
