Defy gravity with out-of-this-world space trivia collected from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
“The universe is everything. It includes all of space and all
the matter and energy that space contains. It even includes time itself and, of course, it includes you.” - NASA
1. The universe is nearly 14 billion years old, our solar system is 4.6 billion years old, life on Earth has existed for 3.8 billion years, and humans have only been around for a few hundred thousand years.
2. Our solar system has one star, eight planets, five officially named dwarf planets, hundreds of moons, thousands of comets, and more than a million steroids. Eight Planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Dwarf Planets: Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris.
3. Did you know that Neptune’s giant, spinning storms could swallow the whole Earth? Neptune’s winds are the fastest in the solar system, reaching 2,575 kilome- ters per hour (1,600 miles per hour).
4. More than 1,300 Earths would fit into Jupiter’s vast sphere.
5. There’s a high chance you’d be able to dunk the basketball on a Martian court because gravity on Mars is approximately one-third that on Earth.
6. To detect the tiny signals from space, the Deep Space Network uses dish antennas with a diameter of up to 70 meters (230 feet), almost as big as a football field.
7. The Milky Way is our home galaxy. It’s a spiral galaxy with a disk of stars spanning more than 100,000 light-years. Earth is located along one of the galaxy’s spiral arms, about halfway from the center.
8. The black holes aren’t holes. They’re vast concentrations of matter packed into very tiny pieces. It is so dense that gravity beneath its surface, the event horizon, is strong enough that nothing – not even light– can escape.
9. Spaghettification - a real term that describes what happens when matter gets too close to a black hole. It’s squeezed horizontally and stretched vertically, resembling a noodle.
10. The Sun doesn’t have a solid surface because it’s a ball of plasma. The part of the Sun we seefrom Earth –the part we call the surface –is the photosphere.
11. Asteroids, sometimes called minor planets, are rocky remnants left over from the formation of our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.
12. Approximately 30 meteor showers occur each year that are visible to observers on Earth.Some of these showers have been around longer than 100 years. For example, the Perseid mete- or shower occurs each year in August, was first observed about 2000 years ago, and recorded in the Chinese annals.
A source from Nasa.gov.