10) Myth: You can’t travel through an asteroid
belt. Reality: Although our asteroid belt is filled
with trillions of asteroids and minor planets, these are spaced incredibly far apart from
each other. NASA has actually revealed that the odds of
colliding with one are one in a billion. The Asteroid belt is a region in our solar
system located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It takes up 50 trillion, trillion cubic kilometers
of space, giving each asteroid an average of a billion cubic kilometers of space around
it. Even asteroids in a cluster or family are
spaced at a distance of hundreds of thousands of kilometers apart. To date, NASA have sent 11 probes through
the asteroid belt without even getting a scratch. 9) Myth: Mercury is the closest planet to
the sun, which makes it the hottest. Reality: A planet’s distance from the sun
has little to do with its average temperature. Mercury is the smallest and closest planet
to the sun, at just over 57 million km away. During the day its temperature reaches a high
of 427 degrees Celsius. However, Mercury’s rotation means that nights
on the planet last 58 Earth days. And the planet’s thin atmosphere means the
temperature plummets as cold as minus 173 degrees Celsius at night. Although Venus is almost twice the distance
from the sun than Mercury, its thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide and nitrogen makes it the
hottest planet in the Solar System. It maintains a constant temperature of around
462 degrees Celsius. 8) Myth: The Sun is a big ball of fire. Reality: Fire is a chemical process that depends
on heat, fuel, and oxygen - a chemical element that doesn’t exist on the sun. Instead, for more than 4 billion years the
sun has been giving off heat and light to our solar system through nuclear fusion. The pressure and high temperature in the sun’s
core cause the hydrogen atoms to stick together and fuse into a helium atom. This energy is then radiated across the solar
system as heat and light. 700,000,000 tons of hydrogen are converted
into helium every single second. The hottest fire that can burn on Earth is
3,038 °C - compared to the temperature of the sun’s core, which reaches 15 million
°C. 7) Myth: You’d freeze if left unprotected
in the vacuum of space. Reality: Outer space is beyond freezing. The temperature measures at 2.7 Kelvin, the
equivalent of -270.45 Celsius. But you wouldn’t freeze there straight away,
you’d actually overheat. In the vacuum of space there would be nothing
for your body heat to transfer to, so cooling down enough to freeze would be impossible. Known as the Armstrong limit, in low atmospheric
pressure, water boils at the temperature of the human body: 37 °C. This means that exposed bodily liquids such
as saliva, tears, and moisture on the lungs would bubble and rapidly evaporate. In 1966 NASA volunteer Jim LeBlanc lost consciousness
after being accidentally depressurized for 15 seconds in a training chamber. The last thing he felt before he blacked out
was the moisture boiling off his tongue. 6) Myth: There is a dark side of the Moon. Reality: The term ‘the dark side of the
moon’ doesn’t refer to "dark" as in the absence of light, but rather “dark” meaning
unknown. The moon is tidally locked with the Earth,
which means that during its orbit only one side of the moon ever faces the Earth. The side of the moon facing away from Earth
is referred to as the ‘dark side’, as it remained unobserved until 1959. That’s when the Soviet Union's Luna 3 space
probe first photographed it. Both sides of the moon experience two weeks
of sunlight, followed by two weeks of night. In other words they both receive almost equal
amounts of light directly from the sun. 5) Myth: Comets have tails because they are
moving so quickly through space. Reality: The comet’s tail isn’t to do
with its speed, or even the direction in which it’s moving. In the deepest reaches of space, far away
from the sun, a comet has little or no tail. As comets travel from the outer regions of
the solar system closer to the sun, they begin to melt. This in turn sends dust particles traveling
in the opposite direction, which means a comet’s tail will always point away from the sun. Comets actually have two tails. One is made of gas, while the second tail
is made of dust and small solid particles. This is because the sun influences the escaping
gas and dust in different ways. As a comet travels, its tails can extend hundreds
of millions of kilometers away from its body. 4) Myth: The Earth is round. Reality: The actual shape of the Earth is
an oblate spheroid. Because of the force of the Earth’s rapid
rotation on its axis, the Earth actually bulges outwards at the equator, giving it the shape
of a squashed ball. Consequently, the diameter of the Earth is
43 km wider across the equator than it measures from pole to pole. Because of this bulge, technically, Mount
Everest isn’t the highest point on the Earth and is in fact beaten to the title by Mount
Chimborazo in Ecuador. Despite it being 2,500 meters smaller than
Everest, its location on the Earth’s bulging equator makes its summit the farthest point
on the Earth's surface from the Earth's center. 3) Myth: Black Holes are funnel-shaped vacuums. Reality: The misconception that a black hole
is shaped like a funnel comes from the 2D representation of how a black hole's gravity
bends the space around it. In the reality of a 3D universe, black holes
are spheres, and their gravity has the ability to pull matter from all sides. An object’s gravitational pull is only as
powerful as its mass allows it to be. So even if our sun was replaced by a black
hole of the same mass, the planets in our solar system would simply orbit the black
hole at the same distance, as it would exert the same gravitational force. 2) Myth: Without a spacesuit in space, the
human body would explode. Reality: While you won’t explode, the low
pressure of outer space would have life-threatening effects on the body’s lungs, heart, and
brain. The rapid exposure to low pressure will cause
ruptures and hemorrhaging to the lungs. The lack of pressure would cause the water
in your body to turn into vapor beneath the skin, causing your body to rapidly swell to
twice its normal volume. But despite the swelling, our bones, skin,
and organs would remain intact within our bodies, preventing the body from exploding. 1) Myth: Zero Gravity exists. Reality: Astronauts in The International Space
Station are able to float, not because there is zero gravity in space, but because of microgravity. The International Space Station orbits Earth
at an altitude of 320 km, which means Earth’s gravity is still 90 percent the strength it
is on the planet's surface. Because of the strength of Earth’s gravity,
the spacecraft, crew, and the objects inside are falling towards Earth. But because the Earth itself is constantly
moving at 28,000 kph, the spacecraft remains in a perpetual state of falling, which is
called microgravity. This falling effect can be seen in the Tom
Hanks Blockbuster Apollo 13. Weightless scenes were filmed in NASA’s
specially modified plane the KC-135, which flew 10 kilometers into the air before going
into a steep dive back to Earth - all to create the illusion of zero gravity for 25 seconds. The film crew endured 612 of these flights
to film four hours of footage.
