Amazing facts about space
by sunil sharma
Space is amazing. The sheer vastness of it. Our galaxy houses some 300 billion stars.Our closest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, has more than a trillion suns. Ultimately, each galaxy is populated with an untold number of planets, comets, asteroids…the list goes on and on. In our galaxy alone, there are an estimated 8.8 billion habitable Earth-sized planets.The cosmos, it seems, is an amazingly massive place. Nevertheless, here are few amazing facts about space.
1.The Milky Way galaxy we live in: is one among the BILLIONS in space.
2.There may be a huge black hole in the very middle of the most of the galaxies.
3.A day in Mercury lasts approximately as long as 59 days on earth.
4.Nicolaus Copernicus was the astronomer who first suggested that the Sun was the center, and that the Earth went round the sun.
5.The brightest star in each constellation is called the Alpha Star, the next brightest Beta, and so on.
6.Over 100 artificial satellites are now launched into space every year, a few of which are space telescopes.
7.The red color of Mars is due to oxidized (rusted) iron in its soil.
8.Earth’s atmosphere is the only atmosphere discovered till date that human can breathe in.
9. Hubble’s law showed that Universe is getting bigger – and so must have started very small. This led to the idea of Big Bang.
10.Three moons have yet been found to have their own moons: Saturn’s moon Titan, Jupiter’s Lo, and Neptune’s Triton.
11.The slowest rotating planet is Venus, which takes 243.01 days to turn around.
12.The sun is about 5 billion years old and half a way through its life – as a medium-sized star it will probably live for around 10 billion years.
13.The first living creature in space was the dog Laika on – board Sputnik 2 in 1957. Sadly, she died when the spacecraft’s oxygen supply ran out.
14.The first manned space flight was made in April 1961 by the Soviet Cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin in Vostok 1.
15.Stars twinkle because we see them through the wafting of the atmosphere.
16.The sun gets hot because it is so big that the pressure in its core is so tremendous – enough to force the nuclei of hydrogen atoms to fuse to make helium atoms. This nuclear reaction is like a gigantic atom bomb and it releases huge amounts of heat.
17.The moon is the only other world that humans have set foot on. Because the moon has no atmosphere or wind, the footprints planted in its dusty surface in 1969 by the Apollo astronauts are still there today, perfectly preserved.On the moon’s surface are large dark patches called seas – because
18.The brightest stars in the night sky are not actually stars, but the planets Jupiter, Venus, Mars and Mercury.
19.The future of the Universe may depend on how much dark matter there is. If there is too much, its gravity will eventually stop the Universe’s expansion – and make it shrink again.
20.Mercury and Venus Have No Moons.
sunil sharma
sunil sharma is a blogger, yogi, designer, engineer and humanitarian.