Amazing facts about universe

Amazing facts about universe

1. Saturn’s moon Titan has plenty of evidence of organic (life) chemicals in its atmosphere.
2. Ever wondered how the pull of gravity is calculated between heavenly bodies? It’s simple. Just multiply their masses together, and then divide the total by the square of the distance between them.
3. SETI is the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence – the program that analyzes radio signals from space for signs of intelligent life.
4. The Milky Way galaxy we live in: is one among the BILLIONS in space.
5. The very furthest galaxies are spreading away from us at more than 90% of the speed of light.
6. The Universe was once thought to be everything that could ever exist, but recent theories about inflation (e.g. Big Bang) suggest our universe may be just one of countless bubbles of space time.
7. If you fell into a black hole, you would stretch like spaghetti.
8. The swirling gases around a black hole turn it into an electrical generator, making it spout jets of electricity billions of kilometers out into space.
9. The opposite of black holes are estimated to be white holes which spray out matter and light like fountains.
10. A day in Mercury lasts approximately as long as 59 days on earth.
11. As the earth turns, the stars come back to the same place in the night sky every 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.09 seconds. This is a sidereal day (star day).
12. When Neil Armstrong stepped on the Moon for the first time, he said these famous words: “That’s one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind.”
13. From the moon, astronauts brought back 380 kg of Moon rock.
14. During the moon landing, a mirror was left on the Moon’s surface to reflect a laser beam which measured the Moon’s distance from the Earth with amazing accuracy.
15. The distance to the planets is measured by bouncing radar signals off them and timing how long the signals take to get there and back.
16. Spacecrafts toilets have to get rid of waste in low gravity conditions, Astronauts have to sit on a device which sucks away the waste. Solid waste is dried and dumped in space, but the water is saved.
17. The Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet smashed into Jupiter in July 1994, with the biggest crash ever witnessed.
18. The first rockets were made 1,000 years ago in China.
19. Jupiter has no surface for a spacecraft to land on because it is made mostly from helium gas and hydrogen. The massive pull of Jupiter’s gravity squeezes the hydrogen so hard that it is liquid.
20. To save fuel on journeys to distant planets, space probes may use a nearby planet’s gravity to catapult them on their way. This is called slingshot.
21. Einstein’s theory of general relativity shows that gravity not only pulls on matter, but also space and even ‘Time’ itself.
22. With powerful telescopes, astronomers can see galaxies 2 billion light years away. This means we see them as they were when the only life forms in Earth were bacteria.
23. The slowest rotating planet is Venus, which takes 243.01 days to turn around.
24. When things are falling, their acceleration cancels out gravity, which is why astronauts in orbits are weightless.
25. The moon’s gravity is 17% of the Earth’s so astronauts in space suits can jump 4 m high on the moon.