46 Space Facts Will Both Mesmerize and Scare You

space isn't supposed to be black there are stars everywhere shouldn't they light up everything around you don't see stars wherever you look because some of them haven't existed long enough for their light to reach earth at first sight the moon seems to be as large as the sun but it's just an illusion the star is 400 times bigger than the earth satellite it's also 400 times farther from us than the moon that's why these space bodies look as if they're of the same size saturn has a moon called pan and it looks like a ravioli it's only 20 miles across and works as a shepherd to the matter that makes up saturn's rings the moon clears an empty space between the rings known as the enki gap and keeps it free from ring particles all of the planets of the solar system would fit between earth and the moon with some space to spare there are huge temperature fluctuations on the moon close to the satellite's equator the temperature rises from -279 degrees at night to 260 degrees in the afternoon our planet's inner core is as hot as the sun's surface yeah it's mostly solid iron and nickel surrounded by super hot liquid and heated up to 10 800 degrees fahrenheit astronauts tasted the first food grown and harvested in space in 2015 it was red romaine lettuce that had been growing in a special chamber for 15 months the fact that in the near future people might not need to bring huge amounts of food to space means we can explore further and longer without running out of supplies there are more than 120 million pieces of junk orbiting earth sadly all this space trash was left by us humans space debris moves at a breakneck speed of seventeen thousand 500 miles per hour around our planet just don't get in the way you might have noticed that there are no solar winds on our planet for that you can thank the earth's nickel iron core coupled with the planet's fast rotational speed these two factors combined create a strong protective magnetic field the solar system is 4.6 billion years old so old it's a senior solar system scientists came to this conclusion after they studied the oldest material they managed to get a hold of and by that i mean meteorites of course you probably heard of methane gas a byproduct of natural processes such as volcanic activity and cows anyway this gas is not only a part of the martian atmosphere but also the thing that confuses astronomers to no end the thing is that the volume of methane on mars keeps wavering and scientists just can't figure out where it might be coming from can there be cows on mars earth might not be the only tectonically active planet in the solar system astronomers have spotted some land forms looking like cliffs on mercury if it's so the tectonic activity could explain the rapid shrinking of the planet not unlike a giant cosmic blinker a super massive black hole 570 million light years away flares every 114 days recently astronomers have noticed powerful eruptions of light coming from the hole the monstrosity is about 20 times the mass of the one at the center of our home milky way galaxy so far the only explanation scientists have is the black hole is ripping chunks of matter out of an orbiting star it happens every time it gets too close this discovery is rather exotic because no one has ever seen a black hole do something like that before usually if a star comes close to a black hole the space monster shreds it into thin strands like spaghetti after that the black hole swallows most of the star's matter the remains arc away in long bright streamers but not in this case every time the star approaches the black hole it loses about three times the mass of jupiter and that's the largest planet in our solar system this also results in a tremendous flare that astronomers can see on earth the flares are so regular and consistent that the researchers managed to predict several of them they happened on september 6 and december 26 2020 a nebula is a cloud of dust and gas in outer space you can see it in the night sky either as a bright patch or vice versa a dark spot against some glowing matter the red rectangle nebula in the constellation monoceros or the unicorn is unlike others our universe has very few straight lines and here you are looking at a giant rectangle which is a huge gaseous nebula no less and then there's also the color a bizarre shade of orange red astronomers suppose the glow might be coming from some unusual activity inside the dust clusters this activity is likely to be going on at the molecular level the universe is around 13.8 billion years old but hd140283 a star informally called methuselah is apparently more than 14 billion years old even more paradoxical the star has some chemical elements that are more typical for a second generation star those are the ones formed from dust and gas left after the explosion of the first generation of stars and still the main problem is how can a star be older than the universe itself so far the most likely explanation is an error in observations gravity is what keeps your feet firmly planted on the ground that's why the average person can only jump about one and a half feet straight up but if we had to live on another planet say venus or saturn let's find out what difficulties we'd have to endure there we'll try mercury first as it's closest to the sun the gravity on this planet is less than half that on earth so you'll be able to jump about four feet high that is if you can stand the temperatures on the sunny side the heat reaches 800 degrees to be there is like standing neck deep in dark red lava on the slopes of a volcano oh boy night won't bring much respite either scorching air will quickly chill to minus 280 degrees you'll also have to be patient since one day on mercury lasts 176 earth days well hopping from this inhospitable place to even less welcoming venus you'd be able to see earth from here if not for the whirling mass of clouds above they create a monstrous greenhouse effect as well as immense atmospheric pressure if you were to jump here you'd make it just shy of 1.7 feet high because the mass and size of earth and venus are almost similar with venus being a little smaller besides the constant temperature of a blazing furnace rain here wouldn't bring relief the clouds up there are made of sulfuric acid skipping our home planet we go straight for its moon luna as it's otherwise called gravity here is less than a fifth of that on earth so if you jump you'll rise almost nine feet in the air and won't touch the ground again for several seconds it's hard to believe this desolate piece of space rock makes tides on earth habit and if you stay on the moon long enough as in a couple million years you'll see how much further it's gone from our home planet next destination is mars the red planet here a vertical jump will take you about four feet in the air if there was any air to speak of of course mars has an atmosphere but it's much thinner than on earth if you stay here until evening you'll be able to marvel at a beautiful blue sunset and you can probably see a mountain from here that's olympus mods the tallest mountain in the solar system it's almost three times taller than everest and it's also a volcano by the way leaping from here to phobos one of the two moons of mars plant your feet firmly and don't be attempted to jump gravity here is so weak that you won't be able to return phobos is really small compared to other moons in the solar system no larger than a big asteroid it's almost a hundred times closer to its planet than our moon to earth eventually it's doomed to be cool critically close to mars and shattered scientists believe mars can obtain its own rings then much like saturn now we're going to a really weird object it's called ceres and it's the largest asteroid in the solar system so large in fact it was later classified as a dwarf planet it's almost exactly halfway between mars and jupiter somewhere in the main asteroid belt if you jump here you'll be taken up almost 52 feet and then slowly fall back ceres is so massive that it accounts for a third of all mass in the asteroid belt fast forward to the next waypoint jupiter being a gas giant this planet has no solid surface so jumping here is irrelevant but if you must you could only hop about 6 inches high jupiter is more than 10 times larger than earth and 300 times is massive so its gravity is enormous there's also a perpetual storm on its surface that's been there for at least four centuries although it's getting smaller with time at the moment our whole planet could fit into that storm our next stop is ganymede the largest of jupiter's moons it's solid so you can easily jump here and make it over 10 feet high this moon is larger than mercury but its mass is significantly lower which makes gravity rather weak ganymede is covered in thick ice and deep beneath that is a liquid metal core this core is why ganymede is the only moon to have a pretty strong magnetic field next we go to saturn the second gas giant of the solar system it's only slightly smaller than jupiter able to fit nine and a half moons in it but way less massive if it had any hard surface to jump from you'd be able to hop as high as 1.4 feet in the air almost as high as on our planet saturn is most famous for its rings which are particles of dust and ice left from impacts with different space objects it spins so fast around its axis that it has flattened itself almost into an oblong shape it also has 62 moons only 5 fewer than jupiter let's explore one of them right now hopping further and here we are on the largest moon of saturn titan jumping here will take you just shy of 11 feet high the atmosphere of this moon is most peculiar it's heavy and mostly consists of nitrogen making the surface appear hazy it's also made almost entirely of ice but there's rock underneath and water is only thought to be deep below near the core and one amazing thing on titan's outside are cryo volcanoes volcanoes that spew ice instead of lava is there so much light on earth but almost none once you leave our planet you might think it's light during the day and dark at night because the earth spins on its axis and the sun illuminates either hemisphere well that's part of the reason but it's more complicated than that i mean our star shines on the moon too but the sky above it is always black it comes down to the unique atmosphere surrounding our earth it's full of dust dirt gases and water droplets which all act like tiny mirrors and reflect the sunlight when sunlight bumps into these small particles it diffuses and creates different colors that's why we see a blue sky and all those spectacular shades during sunrise and sunset it's a whole different story elsewhere if you find yourself on the moon where there's no atmosphere the sky will be black you'll be able to see stars even when the sun is blazing on the surface during the lunar day the same is true of space it's filled with lots of different gases but it has no atmosphere with molecules to reflect sunlight in other words space is empty that's why even when the sun is shining space looks like a black void if one day the earth's atmosphere disappeared it'd be just as dark as it is in space or on the moon that was clear but the sun isn't the only star or source of light in the universe so why don't other stars shine with blazing light at night well you're not the first one to wonder about that an astronomer named thomas diggs researched this question back in the 16th century diggs was sure that the universe had no end and the stars in it could not be counted he tried to answer why all these innumerable stars don't blind us with glaring light but failed his questions were just way far ahead of his time and he didn't have the tools to find the answer in the early 19th century german astronomer wilhelm obers suggested that the reason the sky is dark at night was a dusty veil that hid most of the stars from us this idea also proved to be wrong later the stars shed not only light but huge energy that could heat dust particles so that they would start shining themselves in that case the night sky would still be light because of shining dust recently astronomers have found out that one of the most massive stars in the neighborhood might just have vanished the star used to hover in space 75 million light years away from earth it's usually too far away for scientists to clearly see individual stars unless they're really massive like the one we're talking about it was gigantic and shining two and a half million times brighter than our sun for the last time astronomers saw the stars light in 2011 but when they decided to examine it more closely several years later they couldn't find it such huge stars usually go out in an extremely bright supernova but nothing here which puzzled the scientists to no end there's a theory it collapsed into a black hole and it happened without triggering a supernova first it does occur among stars nearing the end of their lives but very very rarely kb141b is a planet outside of our solar system at first glance it's not that different from earth it has liquid oceans that evaporate into clouds condense and get back to the surface as rain but instead of water this all happens with rock the surface of the exoplanet is covered with lava seas tens of miles deep the temperature on k2141b reaches 5000 degrees during the day it's hot enough for the magma in the oceans to vaporize into the atmosphere then supersonic winds which can move at the speed of one mile per second carry this rock vapor to the planet's night side the vaporized magma cools down becomes liquid again and falls as a rocky rain well looks like we're gonna need a bigger bumper chute a star in the galaxy gsn 069 might turn into a planet the size of jupiter in the next trillion years or so all thanks to the star's regular encounters with a black hole first astronomers noticed bizarre x-ray bursts those were super bright and went off every nine hours after examining this phenomenon the researchers realized it was a star getting flung in a unique orbit around a black hole and the flashes they saw were the material being slurped off the star's surface it happened every time the star darted past its greedy host over millions of years the black hole has already transformed the red giant into a white dwarf and the process isn't going to stop anytime soon there are three golf balls on the moon they were launched during the apollo 14 mission mathematicians claim white holes might exist even though scientists haven't found one yet if you came across a white hole you wouldn't be able to enter it from the outside but you'd see light and matter escaping from within on our planet one full rotation takes one day but the sun is so enormous that it needs 25 to 35 earth days to make one rotation the moon is not a perfect sphere it's shaped more like an egg because of the earth's gravity spacesuits protect astronauts from huge temperature differences during spacewalks from negative 250 degrees fahrenheit to positive 250 degrees fahrenheit a neutron star gets born after a supernova collapses after birth it rotates extremely fast about 60 times per second but this rate can sometimes grow up to 600 times per second in 2007 astronomers started to receive ultra bright and ultra strong radio signals named fast radio bursts they were coming from somewhere billions of light years away when astronauts are in space they often see random flashes of light they occur when cosmic rays hit the optic nerve in the eye if you traveled around pluto's equator it would be the same distance as walking from rome to new york city if you visited gj 504b a planet located a mere 57 light years away from earth you'd see that the planet is glowing it's because of the heat left after its formation the planet's color is a dull magenta like a dark cherry blossom jupiter has the shortest day of all the planets in the solar system it lasts just 9 hours and 55 minutes because of its fast rotation jupiter isn't a perfect sphere it's a bit flattened venus has more volcanoes than any other planet in the solar system there are at least 1600 of them on the planet's surface but most of them are extinct mercury has wrinkles when its iron core was cooling the planet's crust contracted it made the surface of the planet uneven nuclear pasta found inside neutron stars is believed to be the strongest substance in the universe these noodles of neutrons can be 10 billion times stronger than steel some astronomers believe black holes might have no event horizon aka the point of no return instead there might be the apparent horizon it can only trap stuff for some time later matter or energy escapes but in a different form

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Keywords: bright side, brightside, 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, facts about the Universe, mind blowing facts about space, beautiful facts about space, strangest planets in space, planets core

Id: by60ywfwXtY

Length: 20min 2sec (1202 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 27 2021