42 Facts About Space, A Homage to Douglas Adams.

42 Amazing And Weird Science Facts About Space You Probably Didn't Know That Will Blow Your Mind. 

1. If you were able to place Saturn in water it would float.

2. If you placed a pinhead sized piece of the Sun on the Earth you would die form standing within 145 km (90 miles) from it.

3. Space is not complete vacuum. There are about 3 atoms per cubic meter of space.

4. Only 5% of the universe is made up of normal matter, 25% is dark matter and 70% is dark energy.

5. Neutron stars are so dense that a teaspoon of them would be equal to the weight of the entire Earth's population.

6. The Sun is 400 times larger than the Moon but is 400 times further away from Earth making them appear the same size.

7. Seasons last 21 years on Uranus while each pole has 42 years of sunlight followed by 42 years of darkness.

8. The pistol star is the most luminous star known and is 10 million time the brightness of the Sun.

9. Saturn's moon Titan has liquid oceans of natural gas.

10. 90-99% of all normal matter in the universe is hydrogen.

11. Only 55% of all Americans know that the Sun is a star.

12. A full moon is nine times brighter than a half moon.

13. Every year, the Moon is moving away from Earth by 3.8 centimeters.

14. Mars appears red because its surface is covered with iron oxide (rust).

15. Rogue planets are not bound by any star and so "free-float' through Space.

16. Sweeps 10 is the planet with the shortest orbital period found. It orbits its star in only 10 hours.

17. There are approximately 3500 astronomers in the USA, but over 15000 astrologers.

18. The closest black hole to Earth is only 1600 light-years away.

19. It's estimated that there are between 10^22 and 10^24 stars in the Universe.

20. The largest structure found in the universe is the Sloan Great Wall, a supercluster of galaxies 1.37 billion light-years across.

21. Neutron stars can rotate up to 500 times in 1 second.

22. Even if you were able to travel close to the speed of light (186000 miles per second) it would still take 100000 years to cross the Milky Way galaxy.

23. Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to Earth after the Sun.

24. The temperature on Mercury varies so extremely that it will rise up to 430C during the day and drop as low as -140C at night.

25. All 27 of Uranus' moons are named after William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope characters.

26. With 63 moons, Jupiter has the largest number of moons for any planet in our solar system.

27. Jupiter is so big that twice the mass of the rest of the solar system's planets would still not be enough to equal its mass.

28. A dwarf star is so dense that it would take 8 men to lift a single teaspoon of its matter.

29. Due to it's size Pluto is no longer considered a planet and is now known as a Dwarf Planet.

30. Due to its size, Pluto's moon Charon is also considered to be a double dwarf planet (two planets orbiting each other), rather than a moon orbiting its planet.

31. A new star is born in our galaxy roughly every 18 days.

32. The planet Venus does not tilt as it goes around the Sun, so consequently, it has no seasons.

33. It takes 165 years for Neptune to orbit the Sun, meaning it has only recently completed its first orbit since its discovery in 1846.

34. A cosmic year is the amount of time it takes the Sun to revolve around the center of the Milky Way...about 225 million years.

35. A day on the planet Mercury is twice as long as its  year. Mercury rotates very slowly but revolves around the Sun in slightly less than 88 days.

36. Olympus Mons on Mars is the largest volcano in our solar system, almost three times taller than Mount Everest on Earth.

37. An Astronaut can be up to 2 inches taller returning from space. The  carti-large discs in the spine expand in the absence of gravity.

38. A space vehicle must move at a rate of at least 27.35km (17 miles) per second to escape Earth's gravity.

39. The known cosmos contains approximately 50,000,000,000 galaxies.

40. The very furthest galaxies in the universe are speeding away from us at more than 90% of the speed of light.

41. The odds of being killed by falling space debris is roughly 1 in 5 billion.

42. The coldest place in the Solar System is on Earth in Wolfgang Ketterle's lab in Massachusetts. The temperature is 0.000000000001 degrees Kelvin.

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