Interesting & Amazing Facts
Space
Animals
The first animal in space was the female Samoyed husky named Laika, launched by the Soviets in 1957.
Apollo 11
Just twenty seconds' worth of fuel remained when Apollo 11's lunar module landed on the moon.
Astronauts
* Astronauts grow taller (height) in space.
* The first words said from the moon in 1969 were, "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."
* The first words spoken on the moon: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" ... Neil Armstrong.
* In space, astronauts cannot cry properly because there is no gravity, the tears can't flow down their faces.
Black Holes
* Over billions of years, black holes become white holes and they spit out all of the things they sucked in. the atoms are completely jumbled, so no one knows what will ever come out.
* Time slows down near a black hole; inside it stops completely.
Comets
The comet with the longest ever recorded tail is the Great Comet of 1843. Its tail stretched over 800 million kilometers. This is about the same distance the Earth is from Jupiter.
Earth
The Earth weighs approximately 6,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons.
Galaxies
There are over one hundred billion galaxies with each galaxy having billions of stars.
Mars
Some rocks found on Earth are actually pieces of Mars.
Moon
* The Moon is gradually moving away from the Earth and the tides are to blame. Every Year, the Moon moves a further 3.82cm from the Earth.
* Since the moon has no atmosphere, footprints left there by astronauts should remain visible for at least ten million years.
* If you weigh 180 pounds on Earth you would weigh 30 pounds on the Moon.
Neptune
Every 238 years, the orbits of Neptune and Pluto change making Neptune at times the farthest planet from the sun.
Pens
In the 1960's, the US spent millions developing a zero gravity pen for use in space, and the Russians...., they used pencils,
Pioneer 10
The Pioneer 10 spacecraft, launched in 1972, was the first man-made object to leave the solar system. It should reach its next destination, the star-system, Aldebaran, in the year 8,001,972.
Saturn
The planet Saturn has a density lower than water. If there was a bathtub large enough to hold it, Saturn would float.
Solar System
A galactic year is 250 million Earth-years. This is the time it takes for our solar system to make one revolution around the Milky Way Galaxy.
Space Shuttle
The first space shuttle was given the name 'Enterprise' because of a campaign by Star Trek fans.
Stars
* A teaspoon of neutron star material weighs about 110 million tons.
* It would take 29 million years for a car traveling 100 miles per hour to reach the nearest star.
* Scientists estimate that there are at least 3 x 10E16 stars in the universe - that's 15 million stars for every man woman and child on the planet.
The Sun
* The Sun makes up 99.86% of the Solar System's mass. That means that all the planets put together as well as all the asteroids only make up about 0.14% of the Solar System's mass.
* The sun shrinks five feet every hour.
* The sun is 330,330 times larger than the earth.
Sunlight
Energy in the sunlight we see today started out in the core of the Sun 30,000 years ago - it spent most of this time passing through the dense atoms that make the sun and just 8 minutes to reach us once it had left the Sun.
Supernova
* A supernova is the most energetic single event known in the Universe. Material is exploded into space at a speed of about 10,000 kilometers per second and the energy emitted is 1044 Joules. Our galaxy contains about 100,000,000,000 stars and all these stars would have to shine for six months to produce this much energy.
* A Supernova explosion produces more energy in its first ten seconds than the Sun during the whole of its 10 billion year lifetime and that for a brief period, it creates more energy than the rest of a galaxy put together.
* That almost all of the heavier elements in your body (e.g. calcium, iron, carbon) were made somewhere in supernovae explosions.
Universe
The age of the universe has long been the subject of debate. Recent calculations by scientists studying the famous "big bang afterglow" - the background microwave radiation which permeates the universe - have settled on the figure of 13.7 billion years ± 1%, with the first stars forming a mere 200 million years after the initial spark.
Uranus
* Uranus is the only planet that rotates on its side.
* Summer on Uranus lasts for 21 years - but so does winter.
Venus
Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.