60+ Space Facts To Get An "A" In Astronomy

if we build a platform 190 to 250 miles high it's the altitude of the ISS above earth and throw a stone from there it will fall down just the same way it falls down from your balcony 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 planets fast rotational speed these two factors combined create a strong protective magnetic field the Great Red Spot on Jupiter is a gargantuan storm that's been raging for at least 400 years now back when it was first found it was three times the size of our whole planet scientists believe there's trillions upon trillions of light years of space beyond the edge of the observable universe the largest asteroid in the solar system is called Vesta and it's so big that it sometimes even called a dwarf planet Venus spins at its own unhurried pace a full rotation takes 243 Earth days and it takes the planet a bit less than 225 Earth days to go all the way around the Sun it means a day on Venus is longer than a year a full NASA space suit costs an unbelievable 12 million dollars yeah I can believe that 70% of this hefty sum is for the control module and backpack 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 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 a moan close to the satellites equator the temperature rises from minus 279 degrees at night to 260 degrees in the afternoon Mars has two moons Phobos and Deimos in the next 30 to 50,000,000 years Mars gravitational forces will tear Phobos apart and it will likely result in the formation of a ring around the planet I won't be around them Saturn's rings are very thin compared to its size if you had a scale model of the planet that was three feet wide the Rings would be 10,000 times thinner than a razor blade Venus could have had a pleasant stable climate for billions of years before something went wrong astronomers did thorough research and build a model of a virtualized Venus like world this model demonstrated that for most of its history the hot planet had oceans with liquid water adequate temperatures and stable tectonic plates 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 the universe is thought to be 13.7 billion years old but it's constantly expanding and now it's probably about 93 billion light years in diameter but that's only what we can observe once a star becomes too old and massive about four to eight times bigger than our Sun it doesn't have any more fuel left that's why all the reactions in its core stopped the Stars outer layers instantly try to collapse inward but they bounced off the core which remains incredibly dense that's when everything but the Stars core explodes in a fiery supernova even though the climate of Venus changed so dramatically and the planet seems to be totally uninhabitable scientists don't deny that one day the hot planet could be transformed again Venus has more volcanoes than any other planet in the solar system astronomers have already discovered up to 1600 on the surface but there might be others too small for people to see most of these volcanoes aren't active anymore but there are some that could still be bubbling a day on Uranus last 17 hours 14 minutes and 24 seconds but get this the planet has a tilt of around 98 degrees and that makes a season on the gas giant last 21 earth years if there was no gravity in space the earth wouldn't be able to hold the moon near itself all the planets and stars would just fly across the universe freely bump into each other and well it would probably end things really quickly gravity can be tiny but never absent this is one of the laws why don't astronauts just walk on the floor of ISS as we do on earth well the reason for it is that when in orbit they are in a state of constant freefall to earth and the ISS itself is also falling to earth all the time in 2011 astronomers discovered an enormous water reservoir simply floating in space around a supermassive black hole called a quasar floating water vapors have been found throughout the universe but they aren't that common this particular reservoir holds around 140 trillion times the amount of water in Earth's oceans if a body is far enough from a space object say a spaceship flying to Mars from Earth the gravity of the space object will be too small and their mutual attraction will roughly balance each other but no matter how far the bodies get from each other their mutual attraction never equals zero the farthest we can see into space today is thirteen point two billion light years it took the hubble space telescope ten years to make a single image that far our planets inner core is as hot as a Sun surface yeah it's mostly solid iron and nickel surrounded by superhot liquid and heated up to ten thousand eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit comets are thought to come to the solar system from the Oort cloud a theoretical asteroid field that's about 2,000 times as far from us as the Sun you can see solar eclipses because even though the moon is 400 times smaller than the Sun it's also 400 times closer to Earth so it's perfectly capable of obscuring the star but in 50 million years I won't be around then the moon won't be able to block the Sun completely because of the satellites changing orbit 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 N key gap and keeps it free from ring particles the highest mountain in the solar system is olympus mons on Mars it's three times as high as Mount Everest the Earth's highest mountain above sea level if you were standing on top of Olympus Mons you wouldn't understand you were standing on a mountain its slopes would be hidden by the planet's curvature 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 17,500 miles per hour around our planet just don't get in a way good old regular stars keep their spherical shape because their gigantic mass creates a powerful gravitational field that pulls gas toward the center well that's happening their cores produce enough energy to prevent gas from gathering too close to the center the moon is not an ideal sphere it's shaped more like an egg because of the Earth's gravity inside the constellation of the giraffe yup seriously scientists discovered two massive blue stars merging into one and NASA's new Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto and gave us a closer look at what it looks like scientists found a huge floating mountain made of water ice and some signs reading hey we're still a planet discovered in 2017 Celt 9b is the hottest planet we next time you're complaining about the heat on a scorching summer day just remember that temperatures on this planet can reach 7800 degrees Fahrenheit that's because Celt 9b orbits really close to its star which is called Celt 9 this thing is way hotter and bigger than our side experts believe that the giant star might someday evaporate the entire planet with its intense heat imagine being able to travel at the speed of light really short commute huh but think of this you travel 186,000 miles in just one second in other words it would take you just a second to go around earth seven and a half times it seems like an awful waste of endless opportunities to make neutron stars are the size of a small city yet their mass is about 1.4 times that of the Sun they're formed when massive stars die and their cores collapse in on themselves the core continues to press in on itself until all the electrons are essentially crushed together leaving only neutrons this makes neutron stars one of the densest objects in the universe draugar a planet orbiting one of the neutron stars is the tiniest exoplanet astronomers have located so far it's mass is only two times bigger than our own moon 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 ahold of and by that I mean meteorites of course in most sci-fi movies about space the main character gets into an asteroid belt and must dodge countless rocks that threatened to damage their spacecraft well sorry to disappoint but that's nothing like the real thing the only asteroid belt astronomers know about is located between Mars and Jupiter there are thousands of asteroids in this region but they're so widely spaced that the chance of collision is next to nothing ah you just ruined it sorry humans have been exploring space for over 60 years and the effort has certainly paid off all the planets in our solar system have now been explored even the dwarf planets of Pluto and cirrus most of the exploration was done by NASA's Voyager program which began in 1977 Voyager 1 and 2 collected information on the planets their moons and their unique system of rings and magnetic fields 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 even though Venus is the hottest planet in our solar system it still has snow but it's not what you expect its nose metals and rains acid not a great vacation spot the existence of the moon was the result of a clash scientists believe it was formed from the debris of the earth and another space object which was about the size of Mars after they ran into each other among the most spectacular looking space objects are pulsars pulsars are a type of neutron star they shoot out some of their material almost at the speed of light regular pulsars spin at a reasonable speed between about 1/10 260 times per second but millisecond pulsars can spin at an impressive 700 times a second which is way too fast for the human eye to even process as they spin they emit a beam of radiation from their axis that looks like the light from a lighthouse now on earth people are used to a beautiful sunset that's painted in hues of orange red and yellow on Mars however the normally pinkish red sky turns blue as the Sun goes down under the horizon it's because Mars has much farther away from the Sun than Earth making the sunlight less intense on earth sound waves make air molecules vibrate which is why we're able to hear sound other planets and moons allow sound to travel through mediums like their atmospheres and oceans - in space though it's said that there is no sound since there aren't any molecules to vibrate and deliver sound way astronomers have found a massive reservoir of water in space the largest ever detected too bad it's also the farthest 12 billion light-years away from us the water vapor cloud holds 140 trillion times as much water as all the Earth's oceans combined once an astronaut snuck a corned beef sandwich into space but when he took it out in zero gravity the thing started to fall apart the astronaut was forced to hide the delicacy away as soon as possible because the crumbs could damage the spacecraft equipment if you have not become an astronaut like you wanted as a kid out you still have the chance to feel like one on the ground when you sit in a car of a roller coaster and it rises up to the top of the track and then falls down abruptly you'll be in freefall and feel like astronauts do pretty much all the time a trip to the nearest star apart from the Sun would take you five million years on a commercial airplane that's what I call a long-haul fly it takes sunlight on average eight minutes and 17 seconds to travel all the way from the Sun to earth why don't we humans explore space at the speed of light well in short the laws of physics make it impossible the smallest ever observed distance between Earth and Mars is 35 million miles the average distance is around 140 million miles and the greatest distance reaches 250 million miles which is 1,000 times the distance from Earth to the Moon 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 tectonic Li active planet in the solar system astronomers have spotted some landforms looking like cliffs on Mercury if it's so the tectonic activity could explain the rapid shrinking of the planet the average distance between mercury and Earth is 48 million miles which is 10,000 times as long as the distance between Los Angeles and New York traveling at the speed of light you'd spend almost four and a half minutes to reach your destination you can watch two official movie trailers during this time behind the orbit of Neptune lies the mysterious Kuiper belt filled with massive icy objects the most curious thing about this space formation though is that scientists can explain the pattern of its movement the only explanation they have is that Neptune might be hiding a ginormous planet from our sight venus is the closest planet to earth on average the distance between the morning star and our planet is 25 million miles that's 1,000 times as long as the distance around Earth still while traveling at the speed of light you'd need just two minutes before you land in your spacecraft on Venus it might be just enough time to munch on a big burrito mercury is a few billion years old in 2016 scientists discovered some abnormalities on the planet's surface showing that it's getting smaller after more research they found out that mercury hasn't finished cooling down yet the sky might appear pretty peaceful if you look at it from Earth but the Milky Way is headed for a massive collision with the Andromeda galaxy 4 billion years from now set your alarm these galaxies will meet and neither will survive stars will be scrambled and constellations will be undone eventually the two giants will merge and form an elliptical galaxy but according to National Geographic our Sun and earth will survive thank goodness [Music]

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Keywords: 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, good news, bright side space facts, outer space, the universe, Milky Way, facts about the Universe, mind blowing facts about space, beautiful facts about space, facts about space in english, nasa, moons, International Space Station, neutron stars, red giants

Id: b7OswkCei-o

Length: 16min 45sec (1005 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020