Lifestyle
23 Facts about Space That Will Blow Your Mind
The pitch-black void we call Space, is as mysterious as it is beautiful. We might not yet have the answer to the most famous question: “are we alone in the Universe?”, but there are quite a few things we do know about Space. Read to find out some fascinating facts about our Galaxy that will blow your mind.
There are at least 100,000,000,000 stars in the Milky Way other than our Sun.
And that’s just the Milky Way galaxy. Imagine the same, or even more stars in millions of other galaxies.
The Space is dead silent all the time.
There is no atmosphere in space which would enable sound to travel.
There is a gigantic pool of water floating in Space.
The floating pool of water is said to hold 140 trillion times the amount of water that can be found on Earth.
A single day on Mercury lasts for approximately 59 days on Earth.
Imagine how long a Monday on Mercury would be.
The Space is filled with approximately 500,000 pieces of man-made junk.
Scientists are even planning on cleaning up the debris before it starts becoming a serious problem. The debris can travel at 17,500 mph, capable of ripping apart any spacecraft that gets in the way.
Astronauts on the International Space Station basically drink their own pee.
The ISS has a water treatment plant which recycles urine into drinking water. Bear Grylls approves.
Saturn does not have solid rings around it.
The rings around Saturn are made of dust particles, rocks and ice.
The Great Wall of China is not visible from Space.
It’s a shame that smog clouds created over China by air pollution are actually visible from Space.
Food for consumption is growing for the first time in Space.
Astronauts ate space-grown food for the first time on August 10, 2015.
If you ever fell through a black hole, you would stretch out like a strand of spaghetti.
The scientists have termed this phenomenon as – Spaghettification.
There is a memorial for fallen astronauts on the Moon.
A 3.3 inch figurine made by a Paul Van Hoeydonck was put on the Moon in the memory of all the astronauts that died before the Apollo 15.
A mineral discovered on the Moon was named after the Apollo 11 crew.
The mineral was named Armalcolite, after ARMstrong, ALdrin and COLlins.
. Jupiter has no hard surface as it is almost entirely made up of helium and hydrogen gas.
Jupiter has such a massive gravitation pull that it turns the hydrogen from its atmosphere to liquid.
On an average, astronauts grow two inches in Space.
Weightlessness in space causes the astronauts to gain several centimeters during long missions.
The surface temperature of a star could reach 16 million degrees Celsius.
A single grain of sand at such temperature would be enough to kill you, even if you were 150 km away from it.
Space begins at just 100 km above the Earth’s surface.
The imaginary boundary between the atmosphere and Space is known as the Karman Line. So if you had a road that took you in the vertical direction, you could reach space in less than an hour.
There is a planet in our galaxy made entirely of diamonds.
Scientists report that this planet may even be larger than the size of Earth.
Jupiter is 2.5X times larger than all of the planets in our solar system combined.
Needless to say, Jupiter is BIG.
If two pieces of metal touched in space, they would instantly bond get stuck to each other.
The Space smells like seared steak, welding fumes and hot metal.
Some astronauts say that it smells like walnut or arc welding smoke.
The best hope of life outside Earth is above the clouds of Venus.
While the surface of Venus remains too hot for humans to even set foot on, floating cities over the clouds would enable humans to live without wearing pressurized suits.
A day on Venus is longer than its entire year.
Compared to the 365 days Earth takes, Venus completes a rotation around the Sun in 225 Earth days. However, the extremely slow rotation of Venus causes it to complete one rotation around its own axis in 243 Earth days.
Jupiter has more than 50 moons.
The largest moon of Jupiter (Ganymede) is larger than Mercury.