Forty Five Space Facts That Are Out of This World

Forty five facts that prove space isn’t all just ordinary planets and stars.

  1. The sun makes up 99.86% of our solar system’s mass.
  2. Mercury is named after the Roman messenger god.
  3. Venus spins in the opposite direction of most planets.
  4. The Earth is 149,598,262 kilometers from the sun.
  5. Mars is home to Olympus Mons, the solar system’s tallest volcano.
  6. Jupiter is large enough to for the Earth to fit inside it 1,000 times.
  7. Saturn has the solar system’s second largest moon, Titan.
  8. Uranus is the coldest planet in the solar system.
  9. Neptune orbits the sun only once every 165 years.
  10. The Earth orbits the sun at 30 km/s.
  11. The sun orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy at 250 km/s.
  12. The Milky Way moves through the center of the universe at around 600 km/s.
  13. A full moon is nine times brighter than a half moon.
  14. About 1% of the static on the television is caused by Cosmic Background Radiation (CMB).
  15. Cosmic Background Radiation is radiation left over from the big bang about 13.7 billion years ago.
  16. Thirty three light-years away is an exoplanet covered in burning ice.
  17. According to the best estimates of astronomers, 275 million new stars are born every day.
  18. Ninety to ninety nine percent of all normal matter in the universe is hydrogen.
  19. Only 55% of all Americans know that the sun is a star.
  20. Sweeps 10 is the planet with shortest known orbital period, rotating its star every 10 hours.
  21. A dwarf star is so dense, it would take about eight men to lift a single teaspoon of its matter.
  22. If a block of lead was dropped onto Venus, it would melt.
  23. All 27 of Uranus’ moons are named for William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope characters.
  24. Sunsets on Mars are blue.
  25. Mars appears red because its surface is covered in iron oxide or rust.
  26. If you could run at the speed of light, you could complete 7,1054 marathons in a single second.
  27. One day on Venus is longer than one year on Earth.
  28. Astronomers have discovered a planet 4,000 light years away that is made out of diamonds.
  29. The first flower grown in space, a zinnia, bloomed on January 16th, 2016.
  30. A space vehicle must move at a rate of 27.35 km/s to escape Earth’s gravity.
  31. The Earth is slowing down about 17 milliseconds every 100 years.
  32. Earth is actually an oval due to gravity and centrifugal force.
  33. An astronaut can be up to two inches taller after returning from space.
  34. The odds of being killed by space debris are roughly one in 5 billion.
  35. The sun weighs about 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg.
  36. If Jupiter’s 67 moons were lined up side by side, they’d span the distance from Western Australia to New York.
  37. “Moonbows” are rainbows that appear at night.
  38. There may be 20 trillion galaxies in the universe.
  39. Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to Earth after the sun.
  40. The sun could hold 1 million Earths.
  41. A new star is born in our galaxy roughly every 18 days.
  42. Mercury is the second densest planet in our solar system.
  43. The wind on Neptune is so fast it breaks the sound barrier.
  44. If you placed Saturn in water, it would float.
  45. A pistol star is the brightest kind of star, 10 million times brighter than the sun.

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