FYI - Fun facts about space

Here are some fascinating fun facts about space:

A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus.

Venus takes about 243 Earth days to complete one rotation on its axis, but only 225 Earth days to orbit the Sun. This means its day lasts longer than its year!

There’s a planet made of diamonds.

Scientists believe that 55 Cancri e, an exoplanet about 40 light-years away, might be largely composed of carbon in the form of diamonds, due to its high density and proximity to its star.

The largest volcano in the solar system is on Mars.

Olympus Mons is nearly three times the height of Mount Everest and spans about 600 kilometres in diameter—roughly the size of the province of Alberta!

Neutron stars are incredibly dense.

A sugar-cube-sized piece of a neutron star would weigh about a billion tonnes, equivalent to the weight of Mount Everest. Neutron stars form when massive stars collapse under their own gravity after a supernova.

Space is completely silent.

Since there’s no atmosphere in space, sound waves can’t travel, so it’s eerily quiet. Astronauts communicate through radio waves, which don’t need air to propagate.

The largest known structure in the universe is the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall.

It’s a galactic supercluster measuring about 10 billion light-years across, challenging theories about how structures of this size could have formed.

There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on Earth.

Astronomers estimate that the observable universe contains about 200 billion trillion stars—that’s a 2 followed by 23 zeros!

A teaspoon of a black hole weighs as much as all of humanity.

The intense gravity of black holes compresses mass into an incredibly small volume, creating unimaginable densities.

The coldest place in the universe is on Earth!

NASA’s Cold Atom Lab aboard the International Space Station has achieved temperatures of 100 picokelvins, or 0.0000000001 Kelvin—colder than any naturally occurring place in the cosmos.

The Moon is slowly drifting away.

The Moon moves about 3.8 centimetres further from Earth every year. Over millions of years, this will affect tides and the length of Earth’s days.

Space is full of mind-boggling phenomena! What fascinates you most?

Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model