ASTRONOMY FACTS
Thousands years... And we still know very little about the Universe we live in. Here is a collection of amazing, interesting, and strange astronomy facts.
#1 Scientists believe that we can only see about 5% of the matter in the Universe. The rest is made up of invisible matter and a mysterious form of energy known as Dark Energy.
#2 Neutron stars are the densest and smallest stars known to exist in the universe. This density is approximately equivalent to the mass of a Boeing 747 compressed to the size of a small grain of sand.
#3 Black Holes are so dense, and produce such intense gravity, that even light can not escape.
Black hole with corona, X-ray source (artist's concept). image source
#4 Light from distant stars and galaxies takes so long to reach us, that we are actually seeing objects as they appeared hundreds, thousands or even millions of years ago. So, as we look up at the sky, we are really looking back in time.
#5 The Crab Nebula was produced by a supernova explosion in 1054 A.D. The Chinese and Arab astronomers at the time noted that the explosion was so bright, that it was visible during the day, and lit up the night sky for months.
A mosaic image, one of the largest ever taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope of the Crab Nebula
#6 Even though Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, temperatures can reach -280 degrees F. This is due to the planet having no atmosphere to help regulate the temperature. So, the dark side of Mercury is very cold.
#7 Saturn's moon Titan has plenty of evidence of organic (life) chemicals in its atmosphere.
#8 Saturn's rings are arguably the flattest structure known to man, being some 300,000 km end-to-end but with a vertical thickness of about 10 meters.
Saturn's Rings in Ultraviolet Light. image source
#9 The Sun burns 600 million tons of Hydrogen every second.
#10 The Sun is just one of over 100 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, and the Milky Way is just one of over 100 billion galaxies in the universe.
#11 Some pulsars rotate several hundred times per second.
The Vela Pulsar and its surrounding pulsar wind nebula. image source
#12 Space is not a complete vacuum, there are about 3 atoms per cubic meter of space.
A star forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, perhaps the closest Galaxy to Earth's Milky Way
and Of cource the unidentified fact.
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