Space Facts You Probably You Didn't Know
Space is deafeningly quiet.
Because there is no atmosphere in space, sound has no medium or way to travel to be heard. Astronauts use radios to communicate while in orbit because radio waves can still be sent and received.
Our solar system's hottest planet has a temperature of 450° C.
Venus is the sun's hottest planet, with an average surface temperature of around 450° C. Interestingly, Venus is not the closest planet to the Sun-Mercury is, but because Mercury lacks an atmosphere to regulate temperature, it has a wide temperature range.
Mars could harbor life.
Mars is the most likely planet in our solar system (aside from Earth) to be hospitable to life. NASA discovered what they thought were fossils of microscopic living things in a rock recovered from Mars in 1986.
Nobody knows how many stars there are in the universe.
Because of the vastness of space, it is impossible to predict how many stars there are. Currently, scientists and astronomers estimate the number of stars only within our galaxy, The Milky Way. That number is estimated to be between 200-400 billion stars, and there are billions of galaxies, so the stars in space are truly uncountable.
Halley's Comet will not pass close to Earth again until 2061.
The famous comet, discovered in 1705 by Edmond Halley, was last seen in 1986 and is only visible once every 75 to 76 years.
The cost of a full NASA spacesuit is $12,000,000.
While the entire suit costs a cool $12 million, the backpack and control module accounts for 70% of that total.
Neutron stars can spin at a rate of 600 times per second.
Neutron stars are the densest and smallest stars in the known universe, and despite having a radius of only about 10 km (6 mi), they may have mass several times that of the Sun. Because of their physics, they can spin up to 60 times per second after being born from a core-collapse supernova star explosion and have been known to spin as fast as 600-712 times per second.
There could be a planet made entirely of diamonds.
This is quite impressive in terms of space facts. According to Yale University researchers, a rocky planet called 55 Cancri e, with a radius twice Earth's and a mass eight times greater, may have a surface made of graphite and diamond. It is 40 light-years away but visible with the naked eye in the constellation Cancer.
The footprints on the Moon will be visible for the next 100 million years.
The Moon has no atmosphere, so there is no wind to erode the surface or water to wash away the footprints. This means that the Apollo astronauts' footprints, as well as spacecraft prints, rover prints, and discarded material, will be preserved for millions of years.
On Venus, one day lasts longer than a year.
Venus has a slow axis rotation and its day lasts 243 Earth days. Venus's orbit around the Sun is 225 Earth days, so a year on Venus is 18 days shorter than a day on Venus.
The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will collide in 3.75 billion years.
The Andromeda Galaxy is approaching the Milky Way, which contains our solar system, at a rate of around 110 kilometers per second (68 miles per second), and the two will eventually collide to form a giant elliptical galaxy.
If two pieces of the same metal come into contact in space, they will permanently bond.
This amazing phenomenon is also known as cold welding, and it occurs because the atoms of two pieces of metal have no way of knowing they are separate. This does not occur on Earth due to the presence of air and water between the pieces.
There is water floating in space.
Astronomers have discovered a massive water vapor cloud about 10 billion light-years away that contains 140 trillion times the mass of water in the Earth's oceans, making it the largest discovery of water ever made.
The largest known asteroid is 965 kilometers (600 miles) across.
Ceres, discovered by Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi in 1801, was the first and largest object to be classified as an asteroid. It is located in the Asteroid Belt bet
The Moon was once a part of Earth.
According to the theory, when Earth was a young planet, it was struck by a massive object, and the collision broke a piece of the Earth away, resulting in the moon. As a result of the Earth's gravitational pull, this fragment began to orbit the planet.
The mass of the Sun accounts for 99.86 percent of the mass of the solar system.
With a mass around 330,000 times that of Earth, the Sun accounts for 99.86 percent of the mass in our solar system, made up of three-quarters hydrogen and helium for the majority of its remaining mass.
On Mars, there is a volcano three times the size of Mount Everest.
Olympus Mons, a 600 km wide and 21 km high volcano on Mars, may still be active, according to scientists. It is the highest point on the planet. The Rheasilvia central peak on the asteroid Vesta, on the other hand, stands taller at 22 km.
Read next: 22 mind-blowing science facts we didn't know at the start of 2017
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