Space Facts
Posted By: Tarun
1. Saturn’s rings are made up of
particles of ice, dust and rock. Some particles are as small as grains of sand
while others are much larger than skyscrapers.
2. Jupiter is larger than 1,000 Earths.
3. The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is a
hurricane-like storm system that was first detected in the early 1600′s.
4. Comet Hale-Bopp is putting out
approximately 250 tons of gas and dust per second. This is about 50 times more
than most comets produce.
5. The Sun looks 1600 times fainter from
Pluto than it does from the Earth.
6. There is a supermassive black hole
right in the middle of the Milky Way galaxy that is 4 million times the mass of
the Sun.
7. Halley’s Comet appears about every 76
years.
8. The orbits of most asteroids lie
partially between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
9. Asteroids and comets are believed to
be ancient remnants of the formation of our Solar System (More than 4 billion
years ago!).
10. Comets are bodies of ice, rock and
organic compounds that can be several miles in diameter.
11. The most dangerous asteroids, those
capable of causing major regional or global disasters, usually impact the Earth
only once every 100,000 years on average.
12. Some large asteroids even have their
own moon.
13. Near-Earth asteriods have orbits that
cross the Earth’s orbit. These could potentially impact the Earth.
14. There are over 20 million observable
meteors per day.
15. Only one or two meteorites per day
reach the surface of Earth.
16. The largest found meteorite was found
in Hoba, Namibia. It weighed 60 tons.
17. The typical size of a meteor is about
one cubic centimeter, which is equivalent to the size of a sugar cube.
18. Each day, Earth accumulate 10 to 100
tons of material.
19. There are over 100 billion galaxies
in the universe.
20. The largest galaxies contain nearly
400 billion stars.
21. The risk of a falling meteorite
striking a human occurs once every 9,300 years.
22. A piece of a neutron star the size of
a pin point would way 1 million tons.
23. Europa, Jupiter’s moon, is completely
covered in ice.
24. Light reflecting off the moon takes
1.2822 seconds to reach Earth.
25. There has only been one satellite
destroyed by a meteor, it was the European Space Agency’s Olympus in 1993.
26. The International Space Station orbits
at 248 miles above the Earth.
27. The Earth orbits the Sun at
66,700mph.
28. Venus spins in the opposite direction
compared to the Earth and most other planets. This means that the Sun rises in
the West and sets in the East.
29. The Moon is moving away from the
Earth at about 34cm per year.
30. The Sun, composed mostly of helium
and hydrogen, has a surface temperature of 6000 degrees Celsius.
31. A manned rocket reaches the moon in
less time than it took a stagecoach to travel the length of England.
32.
The nearest known black hole is 1,600 light years (10 quadrillion miles/16
quadrillion kilometers) away.