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Human beings have been fascinated with space literally forever. There’s something about the vastness, the twinkling stars, the moving planets, that really kicks our curiosity into overdrive.
Space is also scary, so these facts are kind of as frightening as they are interesting. Please, enjoy.
15. The last blissful 8 minutes of our lives.
If the sun dies, it’ll take 8 minutes for us to realize.
And then the fun REALLY begins.
14. Just pretend.
You could fit all the planets in the solar system in the space between Earth and the Moon.
But not the sun. That’s too big.
13. That seems impossible.
Pluto didn’t make a full revolution around the sun (which takes ~248 years) between being discovered (1930) and questioning of its planetary status (~25% – 1992) or official de-listing (~30% – 2006).
Ouch!
12. How can a planet float?
Saturn’s density allows for it to float on water, if you happened to have a not so small bathtub.
11. Hahaha space jokes.
Saturn is closer to the Sun than it is to Uranus.
Or as I heard someone put it: “Saturn is closer to my anus than Uranus.”
10. It could happen any time.
Due to gravitational time dilation, from the perspective of a black hole’s event horizon, the event that created it only happened moments prior.
But from our perspective, black holes are some of the oldest, and longest living objects in the universe.
And because a singularity is believed to be a point of infinite density, time is infinitly dilated at that point. So from the perspective of the singularity, it exists at only one, infinitly small amount of time.
With this in mind, a black hole would not be an object, it would be an event. More specifically, it’d be an explosion with such a high energy density that it warped the space and time around it, and slowed it down from our perspective.
9. It’s sort of romantic.
This is a cliche but I love the fact that most elements were formed inside the burning furnace of stars.
Everything that exists, you, me, ants, bananas, rocket ships, are literally made of remnants of exploding stars.
Boom.
8. That seems like a terrible way to die.
So far, only 3 people have actually died in space.
Russian cosmonauts who had technical difficulties disconnecting from the space station Salyut 1, opening the airlock of their shuttle (Soyuz 11), exposing them all to the vacuum of space
7. Those are not unpleasant smells.
I’ve always like that even though there is no air, space “stinks.”
Various astronauts have described it as metallic, sweet welding fumes, burnt brake pads, walnuts, and gunpowder.
6. Nothing stays the same.
If you were to scale the universe down so that the sun was the size of the period at the end of this sentence, the nearest star would be 4 miles away.
…ALSO…
The Big Bang was not an explosion of matter, rather it was an expansion of space itself. Everything is getting farther away from everything else, as all space is expanding. There is no center of the universe.
5. Tucking all of those away for later.
Light doesn’t always travel at the speed of light.
“Speed of light” is a bit of a misnomer, which has to be caveated by saying “in a vacuum”. Light travels slower in other substances. A more accurate term would be the “speed of causality”, as it’s the fastest speed at which anything in the universe can possible affect anything else in the universe.
Bonus fact: The blue color of Cherenkov Radiation is a sonic boom that occurs when electrons break the speed of light* barrier.
*Speed of light in water
4. Well?
I just wanna know what NASA’s protocol is for an astronaut dying in space.
Do they send the body back to earth on a little pod?
Do they send the body out the airlock to circle the earth forever?
3. Not shocked Hollywood gets it wrong.
most of what Hollywood portrays about the vacuum of space is just plain wrong.
Space isn’t cold, nor is it hot…by definition of a vacuum, it’s neither. there’s 3 ways something cools or warms: conduction, convection, and radiation. in space the first two are not applicable because there’s nothing to conduct/convect. so the only way something can heat up is by absorbing radiation like sunlight, and the only way it can cool is by radiating it’s own heat, which is a very slow process. Cooling is actually a much bigger problem for astronauts than heating.
Hollywood also loves to portray the explosive nature of space. Open a hatch, and your whole body explodes…and again that’s not true. Again, by definition space is zero atmospheres of pressure, here on earth we are under 1 atmosphere. the difference is enough to kill you, but not very dramatically.
a hole in a space station could literally be patched with duct tape, or by placing a hand over it.
2. Nothing is what it seems.
The age of the universe is not a single number.
Since gravity affects the flow of time, in parts of the universe with more mass than average, the universe is younger than in areas with less mass than average.
1. I love storms!
Almost every planet in the solar system, besides Earth, Mercury, and Pluto, has at least one permanent/semipermanent storm. Venus’ south pole has a hurricane for half of its year. Saturn has an earth sized vortex on its south pole and a hexagon shaped vortex on its north pole.
Jupiter has five vortices orbiting a central vortex on one of its poles. Both Neptune and Uranus have polar vortices. Mars has storms often on its poles, but less often than other planets. Earth seems to be the only planet with a dense atmosphere without a semipermanent storm on one of its poles.
Earth’s storms are actually the most tame of all the planets in both size and speed in general.
I don’t know whether to be uncomfortable or awed, to be honest.
What’s your favorite fact about space? If it’s not here, tell us about it in the comments!
