Welcome to Peter's Space facts page. In the next series of pages I will show you the facts and mystereries of space and our gallaxy. The pages will order from;
- Introduction (the page we are on)
- The Earth and its neighbours
- Looking into space
- Blasting into space
- Mysteries of the moon
- Eyes and ears in the sky
- Space stations
- Making use of space
- And finally, Into the future
What is space? : When you look at the sky on a clear night, you can see the Moon and hundreds, or even thousands of stars. The stars are part of our galaxy, called "The Milky Way". With modern telscopes and space probes, sciestist are learning more about the stars and planets that make up our gallaxy. They are finding out what is space and solving some of its mysteries.
Did you know?
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, it shaped of a gaint flat bun, about 100,000 light years across. If you drove a fast car from one side to the other, it would take you about 665,000 million years!
The "Big Bang"
Astronomers are scientist who study the Universe. They think it began about 15,000 million years ago. There was a huge explosion called the "Big Bang", which sent all the materials in the Universe rushing outwards. Everything in the Universe was created out of this material, which is still moving.
No one knows what causes the huge explosion or where all the gases and dust in the Universe came from in the first place. Astronomers hope to find out it the Universe will go on getting bigger or ever. They think it may stop one day and fall in on itself. However this will not happen for many years.
Are we alone?
The twinkling starts you see at night are very, very far off balls of burning gases, just like our own Sun. As yet, scientist have found no other planets around stars. The Earth may be the only place in the Universe where there is life.
The gigantic Universe:
The Universe is very, very big. It is difficult to understand how big it really is. Even the nearest star is 400 billion kilometers (250 billion miles) away.
Because the Universe is so big, astronomers have a special way of measuring it. They use Light because it travels faster than anything else - 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) per second! This is fast enought to go around the world seven times in a space of one second!
Astronomers measure distance in light years. This is the distance light travels in one year - 9.5 billion kilometers (nearly 6 billion miles).
The nearest star is 4.3 light years away. This means that its light took 4.3 years to reach us on Earth.
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