“Space has a smell. Different astronauts have described it as smelling like gunpowder, burnt almond cookies, pleasantly metallic, welding, and even steak.”
"If you average the colour of the light emitted by galaxies, their stars, and all visible clouds of gas and dust in the universe, it forms a colour similar to ivory, nearly white. The colour is called ‘cosmic latte.’“"
“The International Space Station is the third-brightest object in the sky, after the Sun and the Moon.”
“The average distance between asteroids in the asteroid belt is twice the distance between the Earth and Moon. You could fly through the asteroid belt while texting or even taking a nap without fear of hitting anything. Think about that next time a movie shows flying through an asteroid belt.”
“Space is only 62 miles up. For me, that’s way closer than the state line. How about you?”
“The Sun contains 99.86% of the total mass of the solar system.”
“If we could travel at light speed, it would take around four years to reach our closest star system, Alpha Centauri. Using the now-retired Discovery space shuttle, it would take almost 150,000 years.”
“Moon dust is so fine and sharp, it can even make its way into an astronauts’ suits. Because of its size and sharpness, when the astronauts breathed it in, it caused microscopic tears all through their lungs.”
“J1047b is a ringed planet orbiting V1400 Centauri. What is interesting about this planet is that its ring system is approximately 200 times larger than Saturn’s — which is why it’s also known as ‘Super Saturn.’ If J1047b was where Saturn is in our solar system, it would dominate our sky.”
“You can only survive around 10–15 seconds in a hard vacuum — AKA being in space without a spacesuit. You also would freeze solid in 12–26 hours after failing to get into a suit.”
“If somebody in a different galaxy 100 million light-years away had some sort of super-telescope, they could look back at us and see the dinosaurs. This is because the light reaching them would be 100 million years old.”
“To turn Earth into a black hole, you would need to compress it to the size of a marble.”
“It’s estimated that over 95% of stars in the universe that will ever form have already formed, and star formation now is just 3% of what it was at the peak of star formation more than 10 billion years ago.”
“The Sun is 93 million miles away, so it takes over eight minutes for sunlight to get to us. So technically, we only see the Sun as it appeared eight minutes ago.”
“Apollo astronauts reported seeing ‘light flashes’ while in transit to the Moon. Researchers believe it may be energetic particles from the Sun being detected by their retina. Earth-bound humans are protected from this phenomena by the magnetosphere.”
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