Space facts
24. Hubble made his discovery from the Hooker telescope, built a top a mountain in California- it was the first mountain top telescope in the world and at the time, an incredible feat of engineering.
23. To measure the distance between galaxies in space, astronomers use Cepheids, or stars that periodically dim and brighten. Henrietta Leavitt discovered that by monitoring the time it took these stars to dim and brighten you could calculate how far away they were.
22. Leavitt's discovery of how to calculate distance based on the cycling of Cepheid stars allowed Hubble to prove that Andromeda was located outside the Milky Way, and was thus its own galaxy.
21. Hubble scanned Andromeda for nights on end looking for Cepheid stars, until finally discovering one in October 1923. After monitoring it for a week, he used Leavitt's formula and determined it was indeed located outside the Milky Way.
20. In 2011 the Hubble Space Telescope captureda picture of that star, called “Variable Number One”- or V1. It has been called “the most important star in the history of cosmology.”
19. Of all the planets in our solar system, only mercury and venus don't have moons.
18. The hottest planet in our solar system is not Mercury as most would assume, but Venus. Due to run away global warming, Venus temperature is an incredible 863 degrees Fahrenheit (462 degrees celsius).
17. Not only is Venus' atmosphere blazing hot, but it also has an atmospheric pressure 92 times greater than the Earth's - that would crush you flat as a soda can if you walked on its surface!
16. In 1966 the Soviet Union's Venera 3 was the first man-made craft to land on Venus. Unfortunately its communications system had failed long before reaching Venus and it was unable to relay back any data.
15. Although it crash -landed and didn't send any data back home, Venera 3 is the first human- made object to impact another planet's surface.
14. On the 18th of October 1967, Venera 4 became the first spacecraft to measure the atmosphere of another planet. The soviets initially claimed the craft reached the surface intact, but when the American Mariner 5 spacecraft flew by Venus the very next day, it measured a surface pressure of 75-100 atmospheres, well out of the range of Venera's 4 25 atmosphere hull strength. The claim by the Soviet Union was quickly redacted.
13. Venus's atmosphere is so dense, that parachutes are only necessary to slow down. The Soviet Union's Venera 9 released its parachutes at an atmospheric height of 31 miles (50km) and landed at a speed of only 15 mph (7 m/s). It was also the first space craft to transmit photos from another planet!
12. Our solar system is about 4.6 billion years old, and scientists believe it will last another 5 billion years before our sun turns into a red giant.
11. The tallest mountain known to man is Olympus Mons, an extinct volcano on Mars with a peak 15 miles (25 km) high. It is nearly 3 times larger than Mount Everest.
10. A light year is the distance light travels in one year, or 5.88 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).
9. The width of our Milky Way galaxy according to NASA is about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers, or 621371192237333888 miles- orin astronomical terms: 100,000 light years.
8. Because most stars are so far away, when you look up into the night sky you are not seeing them as they currently are, but as they were thousands of years ago- that's how long their light takes to reach us!
7. Our sun is 300,000 times larger than the earth,but in the universe it's a light weight.
6. The largest star in the known universe is VY Canis Major is- it is 1,400 times larger than our own sun! If you stuck it in our solar system it would extend all the way past Jupiter.
5. Red Giants are really old stars that form when stars 10 times the mass of our sun runs out of hydrogen in its core. As it collapses the hydrogen in the outer shells begin the process of fusion, and the entire star begins fusing hydrogen all atonce. They will burn through all their fuel in just a few million years- unlike the billions it takes our sun- and shine 100,000 times brighter than our sun!
4. These stars often explode as a Supernova- the most powerful explosion in the universe.
3. The original universe consisted solely of hydrogen and helium- every other element on the periodic table and every single thing you see around you today was formed in the heart of exploding stars.
2. That's because when a star goes supernova it releases huge amounts of energy and neutrons, which produces heavier elements. The carbon in your body and the gold in the jewelry you wear were all made from exploding stars!
1. Only hydrogen and helium were formed from the Big Bang- next time you suck down helium from a party balloon you are sucking down a gas that probably formed just 3 minutes after the Big Bang!
~αтυℓ вσүℓℓα~
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