| Astronomy Facts |
Astronomy ---------------- |
| These facts are meant to be accurate, but some facts will be updated in the future. Here I mixed in facts about moons, planets, stars, asteroids, astronauts, universe, constellations, space shuttles, etc. |
| 1.The largest volcano in the solar system is located on Mars, called Olympus Mons, which is about 15 miles high (24 kilometers), 370 miles wide (590 kilometers), and about 3 times higher than the tallest mountain on Earth, Mount Everest. 2.Since Neptune was discovered in 1846, it hasn't made a complete rotation around the sun since, and it will in the year 2010. 3.The coldest place in the solar system is the surface of Neptune's largest moon Triton, which has a temperature of -391° Fahrenheit, only 69° Fahrenheit above absolute zero. 4.The brightest star in the galaxy (Milky Way) is the Pistol Star, discovered by the Hubble Telescope, in the 1990s. It is over 325 times bigger than the sun, (diameter of 860,000 miles), and 10 million (10,000,000) times more powerful than the sun. Astronomers calculate that it emits as much as energy in six seconds as the sun does in a year. Apparently, it cannot be seen with the unaided eye. 5.The constellations of Carina, Puppis, Pyxis, and Vela used to be one constellation called Argo Navis (which was the largest constellation at the time). 6.Space shuttles are always launched in the same direction that the Earth rotates, to take advantage of the Earth's rotational velocity. 7.Aside from that, it saves fuel to launch satellites nearest the Equator. The Earth spins the fastest along the Equator, so the closer a satellite is launched, the more advantage you get in order to exceed the Earth's orbit. Saving all that fuel helps space shuttles to either carry more or complete longer space missions. 8.The United States and Russia do try to make their launchpads as far south as possible. Our U.S.'s N.A.S.A. has it's launcher at Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 28.5 degress north latitude. This gives the satellites an extra (or free) 915 miles per hour. Russia's space program, however, could only get it as far south as 45.6 degrees north (roughly the same as Portland, Oregon) at its launchpad Baikonur, Kazakhstan. This gives it an additional 730 miles per hour. 9.Valentina V. Tereshkova, a cosmonaut of the Soviet Union, was the first woman to be in space at the spaceship Vostok 6 on June 16, 1963. 10.To memorize the order of the nine planets in our solar system, simply remember the sentence "My very eager mother just served us nine pizzas." The first letter of every word from the beginning of the sentence to the end is the first letter of the nine planets from the closest to the sun to the farthest from the sun. 11.In 1985, the first U.S. senator to travel into space was Jake Garn of Utah in the spaceship Discovery. 12.The discoverer of the planet Uranus, named William Herschel, originally named it Georgium Sidium after King George III in 1781, but it was changed to Uranus in 1850 for the reasons of the Roman gods. 13.Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is the only moon in the solar system to have an atmosphere. However, it cannot support life as its atmosphere is made of nitrogen and methane gas. 14.The Sun provides Pluto with 1/1600th as much sunlight as it reaches the Earth. 15.When the star Zeta Thaun exploded, it was so bright that it could be seen during the day (A.D. 1054). 16.The largest constellation is Hydra, which covers 3.16% of the sky. 17.The nearest black hole is 16 hundred (1,600) light years away from Earth, and is named V4641 Sgr, discovered by the astronomers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, in January 14, 2000. 18.Pulsars were discovered by British astronomers Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, Cambridge, England, in 1967. 19.Astronaut John Glenn ate the first meal in space when he ate applesauce squeezed from a tube aboard Friendship 7 in 1962. 20.The smallest constellation is Crux, which covers 0.16% of the sky. 21.The moon is around 238,855.7 miles (384,401 kilometers) away from the Earth. 22.Being made up of mainly gas, the entire planet of Saturn would float on water. 23.In one day, the rotation of the moon moves 13 degrees in correlation of the Earth. 24.There is an asteroid shaped like a dog's bone. It is Kleopatra, number 216, and is about the size of the U.S. state New Jersey. 25.Massachusetts astronomer Maria Mitchell discovered a comet on October 1, 1847, becoming the first woman to do so while using a telescope. King Frederick of Denmark awarded her a gold medal for her discovery, and the Republic of San Marino presented her with a copper medal. 26.The heaviest known meteorite to fall to Earth, the Hoba West meteorite, lies where it fell in Africa. Weighing about 60 tons, it is not likely to be moved. 27.Light from the sun hits the Earth ever 8 minutes (and 19 seconds), so if God poured a bucket of water at the sun, we won't know till 8 minutes and 19 seconds after. 28.Light from the moon hits the Earth every 1.28 seconds (around 1 and 1/4th). 29.The fastest moving planet is Mercury, at around 107,000 miles per hour (29.75 miles per second (47.87 kilometers per second)). 30.The slowest moving planet is Pluto, at around 10,600 miles per hour (2.93 miles per second (4.72 kilometers per second)). 31.The constellation Vulpecula contains M27 (the Dumbbell Nebula). 32.The synodic month (time between full moons) is every 29.53059 days, or 29 days 12 hours 44 minutes and 2.37 seconds (roughly 29 43/81). 33.The telescope on Mount Palomar, California, can see a distance of 7,038,835,200,000,000,000,000 miles. 34.If a year were a second long, then humans can live up to 80 seconds long, but the universe from what scientists estimate would be longer than an hour, day, week, or month, but 47 years. 35.There are 12.36826623 synodic months in a year (time between full moons). 36.There are 13.368 sidereals month in a year. 37.The first constellation added to Ptolemy's list is Coma Berenices. 38.The closest pulsar to the Earth is named PSR J0108-1431 and lies 280 light-years away in the constellation Cetus, and was discovered in 1994. 39.In 1992, a yo-yo was brought into space by astronaut Jeffry Hoffman on the space shuttle Atlantis. 40.The first African American to travel into space was Guion S. Bluford, on the third Challenger flight at August 30, 1983. 41.About 94 percent of all the asteroids lie in the Asteroid Belt, between Mars and Jupiter. 42.Every morning the moon rises 52 minutes later as seen from the Earth. 43.Venus travels around the side the opposite direction as the Earth. So the sun rises at the East and sets in the West. 44.If the Earth was the size and weight of a table tennis ball, the Sun would measure 12 feet and weigh 3 tons. On this scale, the Earth would orbit the Sun at a distance of 1,325 feet. 45.If the Earth were the size of a quarter, the Sun would be as large as a 9-foot ball and would be located as far as a football field's distance from Earth. 46.Quasars were discovered by Marten Schmidt in 1963. 47.There are more stars in the sky then grains of sand on earth. 48.The planet Mars has a lot of iron oxide in its soil, which gives off its reddish color. 49.The solar year (the time the Earth revolves around the Sun) is 365.242199 days. 50.Mensa is the dimmest constellation. (It does not have a star above the fifth magnitude). 51.The Sun travels at a speed of 155 miles per second, but it still takes 230 million years for it to complete a single revolution of the galaxy. 52.A sidereal month occurs every 27.321661 days, or 27 days 7 hours 43 minutes and 11.51 seconds (roughly 27 18/56). 53.The largest basin on the planet Mercury is Caloris. 54.The first vegetable grown while in space was a potato in 1995. 55.A day in Venus is longer than it's year, meaning Venus travels around the sun faster then it spins a 360 degree angle. 56.At midday on Mercury, the sunlight is hot enough to melt lead. 57.Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon with his left foot first. 58.(He was the first man to be on the moon on July 20, 1969). 59.A piece of a supernova star as the size of the baseball on Earth would weigh more than the Empire State Building of New York City. 60.There are 7 stars in the Big Dipper. 61.Neutron stars are so condensed that a fragment the size of a sugar cube would weigh as much as all the people on Earth put together. 62.The Sun is a G type star. 63.Pluto's gravity is approximately 1/17th that of the Earth. 64.13.At Mercury's perihelion (the time closest with that of the Sun), it is only 28.5 million miles away from the Sun (46 million kilometers). 65.The largest moon in the Solar System is Jupiter's moon, Ganymede, at a diameter of 3,273 miles (5,268 kilometers). 66.A star named Barnard's star is approaching the Sun at a speed of 87 miles per second. By the year 11,800, it will be the closest star to us. 67.The most notable object in the constellation Dorado is the Large Magellanic Cloud. 68.The most notable object in the constellation Tucana is the Small Magellanic Cloud. 69.The first photo of the planet Earth taken from space was shot from the Vanguard 2 in 1959. 70.In 1963, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina V. Tereshkova, the first woman in space, married Andrian Nikolayev, also a cosmonaut. Their daughter, Elena, born in 1964, was the first child in history born to a mother and father who had both traveled in space. 71.The diameter of the star Betelgeuse is more than a quarter the size of our entire solar system. 72.How strong are human beings? Very strong. In fact, if an astronaut tried to land on a neutron star, he or she would be crushed by the extremely strong force of gravity, and squashed into a thin layer less than one atom thick. 73.The giant red star Betelgeuse, is so large, that light would take an hour traveling from one end to the other. 74.The only spacecraft to to visit Mercury is the Mariner 10. 75.The lunar year is 354.367 days. 76.The distance it takes Earth to travel around the sun is approximately 595 million miles. 77.(Abstract) Astronomers believe that the universe contains one atom for every 88 gallons of space. 78.From space, the brightest man-made place is Las Vegas, Nevada. 79.The brightest star in the nightsky is Sirius, or Alpha Canis Majoris, at 8.6 light-years away. 80.The largest known galaxy is M87, an elliptical galaxy in the Virgo cluster, containing around 800 billion stars. 81.Cosmonaut Sergei Avdeyev spent 748 days on board the Russian space station Mir. 82.Astronaut Buzz Aldrin's mother's maiden name was Moon. 83.As of February 2003, NASA researcherd were able to find a more precise age of the universe, whereas the former textbooks said around 12 or 15 billion years. The result was 13.7 billion years, thanks to a spacecraft about a million miles from Earth. 84.Stars started shining about 200 million years after the theoretical Big Bang. 85.To reach a point where Earth's gravity is reduced to one-millionth of that on Earth's surface, one would have to be 3.73 million miles (6.37 million kilometers) away from Earth (almost 17 times farther away than the Moon). 86.The distance the Earth's moon is from the Earth is not constant. At perigee, the closest distance from the moon to the Earth, is 221,463 miles away (356,334 kilometers). 87.At apogee, the farthest point from the moon to the Earth, is 251,968 miles (405,503 kilometers). 88.The moon is 27.24% the size of the Earth. 89.Yuri Gagarin (of Russia) was the first man in space. 90.The smallest known galaxy is Pegasus II, a dwarf elliptical galaxy of about 10 million stars. 91.The nearest star to the Earth other than the sun is one of Alpha Centauri's triple star, Proxima Centauri, at 4.22 light-years away, or 24.8 trillion miles (40 trillion kilometers), or 260,000 A.U. (astronomical units). 92.A recent quasar was reported by Xiaohui Fan of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2003, with a redshift of 6.4, equaling to 14.5 billion light-years away. 93.The nearest galaxy is Sagittarius, a dwarf elliptical galaxy, discovered in 1994. It is about 80,000 light-years away from Earth, and 50,000 light-years away from the edge of our galaxy. 94.The Sun’s equator is 2,717,952 miles around. 95.The spacecraft Galileo took the closest photo of Jupiter's moon Europa on its mission on February 20, 1997, at 363 miles away. 96.A most recent and close supernova explosion happened in the Large Magellanic Cloud, some 160,000 light-years away, when Canadian astronomer Ian Shelter at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile on February 24, 1987 observed the photo tooken one day ago. 97.The 3 types of asteroids are C-type (carbonaceous), S-type (silicaceous), and M-type (Metallic). 98.C-type asteroids are the most common, making up around 75% of the known asteroids, while M-types make up the least (around 8%). 99.The first asteroid to be discovered is Ceres, discovered on January 1, 1801, being the second largest asteroid since 2001. |