10+ Facts About Space That Amazed Me the Most

the space between galaxies and stars isn't entirely empty it has several atoms per every 35 cubic feet of vacuum in the visible universe there can be up to two trillion galaxies gas giant Jupiter is the planet with the shortest day in the solar system just 9 hours and 55 minutes because of its fast rotation Jupiter isn't a perfect sphere the planet is a bit flattened but even though a day on Jupiter is more than twice shorter than on earth the year on this planet lasts way longer almost 12 earth years Venus spins backward compared to most other planets in the solar system and the Sun itself one of the explanations astronomers have come up with is a collision with some solid object for example an asteroid lots of black holes are surrounded by streams of dust and gas they circle around the hole just like water moving down a drain in the process columns of matter that look like ginormous fountains rise straight into the air radio signals spacecraft sent to earth are so weak they can hardly power a fridge light bulb when these signals reach the surface of our planet they get reduced to a mere one billionth of one billionth of one watt what that's why - antennas that detect these tiny signals are gigantic some of them reached 230 feet in diameter that's almost as tall as the Statue of Liberty black holes are known to spaghettify things as soon as something goes past the point of no return the black hole's gravitational pull starts to stretch this object in one direction and squeeze in another this phenomenon is also called the noodle effect so there's pasta in space now Jupiter's moon Io has hundreds of volcanoes which makes the satellite the most volcanically active object in the solar system the moon also has a weird yellowish surface it looks blotted and resembles a pepperoni pizza not quite pasta if you were standing at the Martian equator barefoot your feet wouldn't get cold the temperature there would feel like on a sunny spring day but you'd have to wear a hat and your head height it would be freezing cold you wouldn't be able to stand on Saturn the second largest planet in the solar system is made up mostly of gases its colorful rings aren't solid - they consist of dust pieces of rock and ice some of these bits are as tiniest grains of sand others as huge as Earth skyscrapers set and rotates very fast the planet needs a bit more than ten hours and a half to spin on its axis scientists haven't figured out the exact time yet but the year is super long it takes the planet more than 29 earth years to go around the Sun Europa one of Jupiter's four biggest moons is covered with ice this ice shell can be ten to fifteen miles thick it also has some smooth patches so if you're into ice skating you would like it there a three-foot axial jump on Europa would lift you 22 feet high but the landing speed would be the same as on earth a staggering 97 percent of all water on earth is salted and only less than 3% is fresh more than 2 percent of this fresh water is frozen in glaciers and ice sheets it means rivers lakes and underground reservoirs contain just 1% of our planet's fresh water mercury is the smallest planet in the solar system and the second densest it consists mostly of rock and heavy metals if you got there your weight would be just 38% of your weight on earth if you lump together all the known asteroids in the solar system their weight would still be smaller than 10% of the mass of our Moon there are not only dwarf planets but also Dorf galaxies they have from 100 million to a few billion stars for comparison the Milky Way galaxy is made up of 250 to 400 billion stars some astronomers think that black holes might have no event horizon also called the point of no return instead there might be the apparent horizon which can only trap stuff for some time later matter or energy escapes but in a different form the gravity on the surface of Mars is just 38 percent of that of Earth it means you could probably jump almost three times higher on Mars than you can on earth another plays good for high ice-skating axel jumps Uranus may be the only planet in the solar system to rotate on its side the reason might be an ancient mega powerful collision but it's just a theory and Uranus isn't talking earth as a strong magnetic field that protects the planet from solar winds the field exists thanks to the Earth's fast rotation speed and it's molten nickel iron core cryovolcanoes on Pluto sometimes informally called ice volcanoes spit ice or rather a melted mixture of water ice and frozen ammonia nitrogen and methane yeah that's a popsicle you don't want elect Mars might get a set of rings on its own in the next 70 million years its largest moon called Phobos is orbiting closer and closer to the planet one day it's likely dense atmosphere and most meteoroids break up after entering it that's why those that managed to reach the planet's surface leave clusters of overlapping craters mercury has wrinkles when its iron core was cooling the planet's crust contracted it made the surface of the planet uneven these wrinkles are called lobate scarps the biggest of these scarps can be hundreds of miles long and up to a mile high the winds on Neptune are likely to be the speediest in the solar system they can move at 1600 miles per hour and Neptune's huge spinning storms are so big they could swallow the entire earth there are different kinds of galaxies up there astronomers have discovered spiral galaxies elliptical galaxies and irregular galaxies that need to find a bathroom all the time there are also lenticular galaxies that's a mix between elliptical and spiral ones scientists believe that spiral galaxies are younger than elliptical as a spiral galaxy begins to run out of its gas and dust the star formation in it slows down that's when the galaxy starts to lose its spiral shape and slowly turns into an elliptical one the largest known canyon in the solar system is Valles Marineris on Mars doesn't that sound like Martian pasta with red sauce this Canyon system is long enough to stretch from New York to California it's also four times as deep and nine times as long as the Grand Canyon on earth dust storms on Mars are the largest and most severe in the whole solar system it usually takes them just several hours to develop after that the storms envelop the entire planet and go for days or even months on end venus is sometimes called the Earth's sister planet because of their similar mass size and distance from the Sun at the same time Venus is very different from Earth and some other aspects for example its temperatures way higher and the atmosphere is much denser scientists think that the moon's surface has more craters than Earth because it doesn't have so much natural activity going on wins rains earthquakes and erosion keep remaking the surface of our planet but the moon has almost no whether to change its appearance Venus the hottest planet in the solar system heats up to the average temperature of almost 900 degrees Fahrenheit that's hotter than a self-cleaning oven earth grazing fireballs are bright meteors that enter the Earth's atmosphere but then leave it again the largest planet in the solar system Jupiter also has a set of rings but they're dark and almost impossible to see with the unaided eye the rings are made up of tiny bits of dust and might have existed since Jupiter was formed Saturn is the most flattened planet in the solar system it's squished at the poles and any point on the equator is about four thousand miles further from the center of the planet than the poles stars don't actually twinkle it just looks so because of the turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere it deflects the light from stars that reaches your eyes making it shimmer a starburst galaxy is a galaxy that forms tons of new stars that is super fast speed it usually happens after two galaxies merge into one scientists don't think food astronauts eat in space tastes the same as it would on earth the food you eat tastes rather bland if you can't smell it but in zero-gravity odors don't really make it to your nose that's why astronauts preferred foods with strong flavors for many years NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has been helping astronomers peer into distant galaxies it orbits the planet at a speed of over 17,000 miles per hour and rotates 90 degrees every quarter of an hour there's a theory that we're living in some kind of virtual reality then our universe could be a giant quantum computer and atoms and electrons nothing else but data bits seems kind of like a kooky matrix if you've seen that movie but hey it's a theory another idea is that the universe we live in is just a tiny bubble among other similar bubbles scientists who support this theory are sure that neighboring universes can come into contact with one another gravity starts to flow between them and when two or three of universes connect a big bang occurs just like the one that started our home universe despite their name neutron stars aren't exactly stars they're city-sized objects with a huge mass usually about 1.4 times that of the Sun a neutron star is a collapsed core of a large star that ended its life in a brilliant burst of light turning into a supernova neutron stars are incredibly dense and keep getting even denser with time that's why a piece of neutron star material the size of a sugar cube would weigh a billion tons almost as much as Mount Everest the stars gravity is nothing but incredible - it's two billion times stronger than the gravity on earth the sun's outer layer is much hotter than its surface the star's temperatures vary from 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit close to the surface to 900,000 degrees fahrenheit in the corona the sun's outermost layer there are tens of thousands of black holes at the center of our home Milky Way galaxy hundreds of them are paired with the star and nearly 10,000 are isolated ones who they need a friend the Hubble Space Telescope weighs almost as much as two male African elephants and is as long as a big school bus and made almost 1.5 million observations since it was launched in 1990 astronomers have used this data to write about 15,000 scientific papers everything on earth and everything people can see in space with the help of telescopes is normal matter it's made up of atoms and molecules and adds up to less than 5% of the universe almost 70% of the universe is dark energy and the remaining 25% is dark matter a black hole is some matter squeezed into an insanely dense package that turn earth into a black hole you would have to squeeze it until it was the size of a marble and if the Sun was compressed enough to become a black hole it would be no bigger than four miles across in billions of years the universe is likely to expand so much that we won't see any stars in the sky whatsoever the Big Bounce is one of the theories speculating what could be before the Big Bang it claims there could be countless big banks while the universe kept expanding shrinking and expanding again it means we might be living in an infinite sequence of universes Saturn has a mysterious vortex swirling over the planet South Pole the whole thing resembles an enormous hurricane-like storm measuring almost 5,000 miles across that's two-thirds the diameter of Earth by the way what confuses astronomers is that although the phenomenon looks like a hurricane it doesn't behave like one there might be one more ninth planet in our solar system but even though some evidence does exist astronomers haven't confirmed this guess yet stay tuned earth is the densest planet of the solar system its ball-shaped core is almost 88 percent iron the universe is constantly expanding at the moment it's likely to be 93 billion light years in diameter but that's only the size of the chunk we can observe things in space stay in place thanks to gravity planets stars galaxies and clusters are bound together by this force gravity is also the reason why large celestial bodies have a spherical shape the Hubble Space Telescope managed to sneak a peek back into the dim and distant past two places thirteen point four billion light-years away from Earth black holes are huge energy factories generating more power than our Sun they also do it much more efficiently earthquakes on the moon don't occur as often as on our planet but when they do it happens closer to the center of the satellite scientists think moon quakes might be caused by the gravity of Earth and the Sun there might be white holes the opposite of black holes while nothing can enter them from the outside things like matter and light can escape from inside such holes but however exciting this phenomenon is so far it's just a theory Saturn is the only planet in the solar system that's less dense than water in other words if you found a bathtub huge enough to fit this gas giant it would float there like a rubber dock the Hubble Space Telescope gathers more than 10 terabytes of new data every year that's 2 million 5 minute long songs 3.1 million high-resolution pictures or 5 thousand hours worth of movies the telescope's total archive is over 150 terabytes of information mercury is a few billion years old but in 2016 scientists discovered some abnormalities on the planet's surface these oddities indicated mercury was getting smaller it can only mean that the planet hasn't finished cooling down yet space isn't always called if it's in direct sunlight it can heat up to insane temperatures the Andromeda galaxy is the closest neighbor of our Milky Way it's just 2.5 million light years away if you squint really hard you can see it on a clear night with the unaided eye you can even wave at it but a more worrying fact is that in some 4 billion years our galaxy is likely to collide with the Andromeda galaxy experts believe earth will survive but the sky will look totally different from now there's an unusual storm raging at the North Pole on Saturn it has a weird six-sided shape one of Saturn's moons Iapetus has a bizarre two-tone coloring the difference between the satellites two hemispheres is great one of them is light and the other is eerily dark scientists haven't figured out this mystery yet as for all that theoretical pasta in the universe it appears to be coming from the fusilli galaxy home to the exoplanets rigatoni and fettuccine

Channel: BRIGHT SIDE

Views: 590,209

Rating: 4.8606915 out of 5

Keywords: good news, recent space discoveries, latest space discoveries, facts about space, facts about space and planets, facts about space and the universe, facts about space and stars, facts about space and the solar system, facts about space bright side, bright side space facts, outer space, the universe, Milky Way, facts about the Universe, black holes, mind blowing facts about space, beautiful facts about space, facts about space in English, NASA discoveries

Id: 1ccnF9ewNqc

Length: 16min 41sec (1001 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 17 2020