10 amazing things about space you need to know
Space is the final frontier, but it’s so much more than what we see in movies and television shows. You can find everything from giant black holes to white dwarfs, and every single one of them has some pretty amazing facts attached to it that you should know about! Here are ten facts about space that you never knew, but definitely should!
1) The first-ever photos from deep space
On July 20, 1965, NASA launched its first mission to map out an image of Earth from space. Named Pioneer 5, it sent back a grainy black-and-white photo showing two prominent land masses and one very tiny speck of blue water. Today—49 years later—we know that photo was taken at a distance of about 3 million miles from Earth—or about 900 times farther away than we are from the moon.
2) How fast is light?
One of our favorite facts about space is how fast light travels. At 186,282 miles per second, it’s one of the fastest things in existence. And as far as we know, it’s totally unlimited—even light itself has no idea where it will end up next! The fact that NASA can hit a golf ball in space using a laser pointer just shows you how crazy-fast light really is! How cool is that?
3) We are made of star-stuff
It’s true, as Carl Sagan taught us: The most abundant elements in our bodies—carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and so on—were literally produced inside stars. When a star dies, it goes out with a bang (or sometimes a whimper) and scatters its atoms across space. Scientists estimate that about 10 percent of all atoms in our bodies were created by stars that have already died.
4) If you could fold a t-shirt in half 57.6 times...
The Earth is about 57.6 times bigger than a t-shirt. That means that you could fold a t-shirt 57.6 times, and it would reach from one side of the Earth to another! If you do that with a small piece of paper, though, it’ll probably break long before you can make it all around our planet. Still...that’s pretty cool!
5) A top speed of 7.62 miles per hour is nowhere near the fastest anything can go
Just like in our solar system, where Mercury can whip around its orbit at nearly 30 miles per hour, and Jupiter’s Great Red Spot churns at a top speed of 161 miles per hour. According to NASA, anything moving through space faster than 299,792 kilometers per second—that’s about 669,035 miles per hour—is considered relativistic. And that means you have one heck of a view.
6) Why are we here?
Earth is a tiny little speck of dust in our solar system, and there are billions of other stars that have their own planetary systems. Out of all those stars and planets, why does Earth stand out? Nobody knows for sure. We just know that it’s here, we live on it, and there’s nowhere else like it.
7) What is the time?
We think of time as an orderly progression of cause and effect, but physicists are still struggling to understand why the time has a direction—and what it means for us. Plus, you thought space was weird. Einstein’s theory of special relativity teaches us that time and space are intimately intertwined: The distance between two objects is not just affected by your velocity relative to those objects, but also by their velocity relative to you! This fact highlights one of the great mysteries about our universe: Why does everything move at different speeds?
8) Where did it all come from?
Scientists believe that all of space was created in a big bang around 13.8 billion years ago. Although there are various theories as to how our universe evolved since then, they generally agree on one thing: All we can see today—planets, stars, galaxies—all came from that first moment. But where did it all come from? We still don’t know for sure, but what we do know is simply awesome.
9) Waterfalls on Mars
Mars appears to have a lot of open water flowing on its surface, which means that it might have once been a warmer and wetter planet. This idea, known as the Mars waterfall theory is based on images taken by probes such as NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers in 2004.
10) The Sun Could Stop Shining – Here’s What Would Happen Next
The sun is 4.5 billion years old, which means it has likely only got a few billion years left before it burns out and ceases to exist. But even when it does, life on Earth will go on – here’s what would happen if we were around to see that day..
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