Interesting Facts About Space

Space is mysterious and beautiful, understand it more with this list of one hundred interesting facts about space, planets, moons and stars!
Mercury and Venus are the only two planets in our solar system that do not have any moons.

If a star passes too close to a black hole, it can be torn apart.
The hottest planet in our solar system is Venus. Most people often think that it would be Mercury, as it’s the closest planet to the sun. This is because Venus has a lot of gasses in its atmosphere, which causes the “Greenhouse Effect”.

The solar system is around 4,500 million years old. Scientist estimate that it will probably last another 5000 million years
Enceladus, one of Saturn’s smaller moons, reflects some 90% of the sunlight, making it more reflective than snow!

The highest mountain known to man is the Olympus Mons, which is located on Mars. It’s peak is 15 miles (25KM) high, making it nearly 3 times higher than Mt Everest.

The Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) was the very first celestial object to be identified as being spiral.

A light year is the distance covered by light in a single year, this is equivalent to 5.88 trillion miles (9.5 trillion KM)!

The width of the Milky Way is around 100,000 light years.
The Sun is over 300,000 times larger than Earth.

Footprints and tire tracks left by astronauts on the moon will stay there forever as there is no wind to blow them away.
Because of lower gravity, a person who weighs 100kg on earth would only weigh 38kg on the surface of Mars.

64 moons orbit Jupiter.

The Martian day is 24 hours 39 minutes and 35 seconds.

NASA’s Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) 
declared that they have found evidence of significant amounts of water on the Earth’s Moon.

The Sun makes a full rotation once every 25-35 days.
Venus is the only planet that spins backwards relative to the other planets.

The force of gravity can sometimes cause comets to tear apart.

It is thanks to the Sun and our own moons gravity that we have high and low tides.

Pluto is smaller than the Earth’s moon!

According to mathematics, white holes are possible, although as of yet, we have found none.

Our moon is around 4.5 billion years old.

There are more volcanoes on Venus than any other planet within our solar system.

Uranus’ blue glow is down to the methane in its atmosphere, which filters out all the red light.

The four planets in our solar system that are known as gas giants are Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn and Uranus.

Uranus has 27 moons that have been discovered so far.
Because of its unique tilt, a single night on Uranus lasts for 21 years!

Triton, one of Neptune’s moons, is gradually getting closer to the planet it orbits.

Scientists say that eventually Triton will get so close to Neptune, it will be torn apart by gravity, and Neptune could end up with more rings than Saturn currently has!

The only large moon in our solar system to orbit in the opposite direction of its planet is Neptune’s moon, Triton.

Neptune takes 165 years to make one orbit of the moon. this means that since it’s discovery in 1846, it has only completed just one orbit!

Charton is one of the moons of Pluto, and is only slightly smaller than Pluto itself.

The Space Station is the largest manned object ever sent into space.
A day on Pluto lasts for 6 days and 9 hours.

Saturn is the second largest planet in our solar system.

Any free-moving liquid in outer space will form itself into a sphere, because of its surface tension.

Earth, Mars, Mercury and Venus are called the inner planets as they are closest to the sun.

We know more about space than we do about deep in our oceans.

The only satellite that Britain has launched was called Black Arrow.
Black Arrow was developed during the 1960’s and was used for 
four launches between 1969 and 1971.

The light takes 8.3 minutes to travel from the Sun the Earth.

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

The Earth’s revolution time increases .0001 seconds annually.

If you were driving at 75 miles (121 km) per hour, it would take 258 days to drive around one of Saturn’s rings.

The first man on the moon was Neil Armstrong.

The Space Station circles the earth every 90 minutes.

Stars seem to twinkle in the night sky due to the light being 
disrupted as it passes though the Earth’s atmosphere.

Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon with his left foot.

There are three main types of galaxies out in space, and they are spiral, elliptical, and irregular.

There are approximately 200,000,000,000 stars in the Milky Way.
 
More at: http://www.thefactsite.com/2012/01/100-random-facts-about-space.html/2