Interesting facts
AstroFacts
A hypothetical Mars with oceans a billion years ago
Snow flakes It takes a billion billion snow flakes to make a comet, and one billion comets to make a 'Pluto'.
A shocker Reduce the known universe to the size of the Earth and the portion of that universe in which humans can live, without wearing a space suit or living in a pressurized cabin, is about the size of a single atom.
Music in Space The universe resonates at a pitch that is 33,000 times lower that James Earl Jones: "This is CNN."
Kuiper Belt objects, a group of asteroids orbiting beyond the orbit of our outermost planet, Pluto, originated much closer to the Sun but were exiled into darkness by the gravity of the planet Neptune.
Einstein called it "spooky." Physicists call it entanglement. It appears that photons, electrons, and other elementry particles have the ability to interact with each other even when miles apart.
How many stars in the universe? 100 billion stars times 100 billion universes (on the average) equals 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. (10 followed by 21 zeros)
Hubble and the 100" telescope at Mt Wilson Calif. determined in the 1920s that the universe is expanding.
Poem: "The Cosmos, it seems, is full of surprises. The Sun doesn’t set -- the horizon rises."
String theory: Strings may be the smallest pieces of matter. If an atom were expanded to the size of the solar system, one string would be the size of a tree. See the next item for "super" strings.
Super Strings (SS) Faster-than-light travel is a possibility if starships can travel on yet-to-be-discovered SS. These objects may be concentrated strands of energy that crisscross the universe. SS may be as thin as atoms with a 3-foot-long piece of a SS weighing as much as the Earth.
Farthest object in the solar system? Three Kuiper Belt Objects -- worlds much like Pluto that orbit the Sun beyond Neptune. Each KBO 15-21 miles (25-45 km) with unexciting names of 2003 BF91, 2002 BG91, and 2003 BH91. These KBOs were discovered by the Hubble Telescope on Jan. 26, 2003.
Fathest planet in the universe? A Jupiter-size world 5,600 light years away orbits a binary star in a globular star cluster in Scorpio that is 13 billion year old and called M-4 . The binary system is a white dwarf and a neutron star. The planet, twice the mass of Jupiter, had to have been born around a sun-like star.
Star & Moon Music: Quiet Night and Stars, Moonlight Becomes You, When the Moon Hits Your Eye, Sunshine On My Shoulder, Hold On to the Night, In the Misty Moonlight, Moonlight Serenade, Fly Me to the Moon, Blue Moon, Shepherd Moons, Moon River, Pennies from Heaven, On Moonlight Bay, When You Wish Upon a Star, In the Chapel in the Moonlight, Paper Moon, Silver Moon, (send me your sugestions).
The universe is so big, light from its fathest regions hasn't reached Earth yet.
Life expectancy was 18 years for the first 99% of humanity's existence on Earth.
A Space Shuttle would take 82,000 years to travel 4.3 light years to the next star, Alpha Centauri.
Two Mars missions: Each has a golf-cart-size rover. Spirit will land early January 2004 in Gusev crater while Opportunity lands later that month, in Meridiani Planum on the opposite side of Mars. Specifications: Speed 0.1 m.p.h. (2 inches per second). Life expectancy of 93 days. Daily range of 131 feet or 40 meters.
The universe, crushed to the density of a neutron star, would fit inside the orbit of Mars
Longest year in history? Julius Caesar gave the year 46AD 445 days. This was to change Rome's innaccurate calendar to the one used today -- the Julian Calendar.
The most distant object -- a galaxy 13.6 billion light years away first seen by astronomers in 2002.
M51 is one of the few galaxies whose arms are visible through small telescopes to amateur observers.
Cosmic "branes" may be flat, parallel universes that occasionally "bang together" to recreate universes (like ours) within a much more vast structure that may never have had a beginning and may never have an end.
Quarks are not stars. The announcement of Quark stars was premature and a mistake.
5.4 minutes: the fastest that binary stars revolve around each other that are only six earth-diameters apart.
The star Altair is oblate because it rotates so fast -- 210 km/s (130 miles per second)
Most massive star measured to date is 57 times more massive than the Sun.
A Pulsar with planets? Yes, four 4 low mass planets have been discovered the orbiting Pulsar B1257+12
Windy star: Vegan winds extends 1.5 light years from this class A star.
Sodium is the first element discovered in an extra-solar planet's atmosphere. It orbits the star HD 209 548.
New Planets: As of November 2003 more than 110 planets have been discovered orbiting other stars in 11 multiple-planet systems. Of these, one orbits in a record breaking 2.9 days and one orbits a fairly compact binary system, Gamma Cephei. Each planet is a gas giant and larger than Jupiter.
The 12 newest stars found within 33 light-years of the Sun are in 9 systems: 7 single stars, 1 double system, and 1 triple system, bringing the total number of known stars (within 33 LY) to 336; made up of 228 systems.
Molecules: 120 have been found in dust clouds in space.
Comets eject meteoroids that become meteors. Meteors are the size of the eraser on a pencil.
Small diamonds are found in meteorites thought to originate near the Sun and not interstellar space
Ceres is the first asteroid to be photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Our Next Generation Telescope, the James T. Webb Telescope, is named in honor of a NASA administrator.
The Sloan Sky Survey mission is to photograph the entire sky. Its website has motion pictures and excellant information at http://skyserver.fnal.gov
Neutrinos have mass. The biggest news of the decade is that all three types of neutrinos (electron, muon, and tau) have been detected by the Sudbury neutrino detector and have turned physics on its "head".
A planet found in the constellation Orion? Yes, because of a fluke combination of Orion's upper corner extending into the Zodiac at the same time Saturn was traveling below the ecliptic.
French, ice-drilling cryobots may be sent to Mars in 2007 and also to Jupiter's moon Europa in 2008. They will search for microbes living beneath the ice surfaces. Each is 3.3 feet long and 5 inches wide.
The Astronomical League (made up of 240 American astronomy societies) will attach a 16-inch (40-cm) Cassegrain reflector telescope to the International Space Station by 2010 to be used by amateurs.
The color of the universe? A pale shade of green, somewhere between medium aquamarine and turquoise.
Digital tripod photography is possible with an expensive camera that allows manual focussing, manual selection of several-second exposures with its lens set as wide open as possible, ability to override the flash, and the ability to automatically shoot a dark frame after you take a timed exposure.
NASA's JIMO (Jupiter Icy Moon Orbiter) launches in 2007 to examine Jupiter and its moons in unprecedented detail, in particular the possible subsurface water oceans of moons Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.
Black Holes, regions of space so dense that light can't escape their gravitational pull, come in three sizes: small, medium, and large. Small ones have the mass of just a few suns and intermediate ones have the mass of several hundred suns. The largest black holes have the mass of several million suns.
The 2003 Mars opposition on Aug. 27, brought Earth and Mars closer than they have been since 57,617 B.C. The next closest opposition takes place in summer 2287.
More Jovian Moons. Jupiter now has more than 61 moons. New "possibles" are being tracked by University of Hawaii astronomers using giant telescopes on Mauna Kea. Each is 1 - 4 km ( 0.6 to 2.5 miles) wide.
Comets. The most comets discovered in a single photograph was by astronomer Carolyn Shoemaker -- 32.
Rings around the Earth? Possibly. Some 35 million years ago an asteroid may have grazed Earth at an oblique angle, plowing across the surface, then ricocheting away into the solar system. This threw material into space close to Earth that formed rings that persisted for 100,000 years. By blocking out sunshine at the equator, the rings caused weather changes and extinctions that mark the end ofthe Eocene Age.
Oh no! Planetary alignments! Don't fret. Nothing ever happens. Neither of the last 2 (Feb. 1962 & May 2000), when all planets lined up spanning 16° and 25° respectively, caused any kind of measurable effects.
Brown Dwarfs, (known as failed stars) are neither stars nor planets. they outnumber normal stars by 2 to 1 and seldom are found orbiting stars. Surprisingly, they are red, not brown; radiate their heat in infrared light; rotate in less than 1 hour; and have hydrogen cores (as opposed to planets that have rock-ice cores).
Blue moons are the 4th Full Moon in any 3-month season. They are not the 2nd Full Moon in any one month.
A new asteroid belt may lie between the orbits of Earth and Mars. Astronomers determined this after finding these three near-Earth asteroids in that zone: 1996 XB27, 1998 HG49, and 1998 KG3.
Comet Alert! In 1.4 million years the star GL 710, will dip into Earth's Oort (comet) Cloud and pass within 1.1 light years of the sun launching about 3 million comets on paths that will cross Earth's orbit.
Age of the universe? As of mid-2003: 13,700,000,000 years.
The Sun is a variable star that brightens and dims over an 11-year cycle with a mere 0.1 % change, but enough to change Earth's climate.
Both martian polar caps consist of water ice and traces of frozen carbon dioxide.
Coldest spot in the universe is the Boomerang Nebula in the constellation Centaurus. It is 5,000 LY distant and its temperature is -272° Centigrade. That is 1 degree warmer than absolute zero -- 0° Kelvin, or -273 C, or -457° F. The residual heat from the Big Bang's is 2° C warmer.
Saturn's rings, the thinnest objects known, compare to a 20-mile-wide CD disk of normal thickness.
The chances of our planet being hit by an asteroid large enough to do great damage to Earth is about the same as you being killed in an airplane crash -- 1 in 10,000.
The International Space Station weighs 170 tons, is 50 meters long (150 feet), and travels 7 kilometers per second (4 mps) at a heighth of 400 Km (250 miles).
The 300-foot-wide radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, has the capability of receiving a cell phone call from the planet Jupiter 631 million kilometers (390 million miles) away.
None of the Apollo equipment left behind on the Moon is visible with Earth-based telescopes.
Latest map of the universe: the 1998-2002 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey reaches out 3 billion light years, covers 5% of the sky, and studies red shifts of 246,677 galaxies and 30,0000 quasars.
NASA's Galileo was crashed into Jupiter in September 2003 to protect the moon Europa from contamination.
The closest star to Earth is the Sun.
The closest star to the Sun is Proxima Centauri a yellow-red dwarf orbiting the Alpha Centauri binary star system. Proxima is 13,000 times dimmer than the Sun and 4.2 light-years away -- 1/10th light year closer than either Alpha Centauri 1 or 2. They are 4.4 LY from Earth. Proxima has no planets.
Most common star systems are binary with each star separated by a Sun to Neptune distance.
Reddest star: Mu Cephei (the Garnet Star) a red supergiant with a diameter equal to the Earth-Sun distance. If it took the Sun’s place, its surface would reach out to the planet Saturn.
Fastest moving star: the pulsar PSR 2224+65 moves 1,600 kps of 1,000 mps.
Saturn is at opposition with its rings wide open on Dec. 3, 2003. This offers the best view of its rings in decades.
The "beginning" of dinosaurs may also be linked to an asteroid strike 200 million years ago.
New Discovery: Quauor (kwah-wahr). This 800-mile-wide-object, 1/2 the size of Pluto, and made of ice and rock, is a cousin to the planet Pluto, Quauor is a "Kuiper Belt Object" located in the Kuiper Belt past the planet Neptune about 4 billion miles out from the Sun. It and 300 similar objects, including Pluto, are called Plutinos because they keep a 2 to 3 resonance with Neptune.
The solar system's edge is 55 astronomical units or 5 billion miles or 8 billion km from the Sun.
The Moon's core is about 400 miles in diameter, highly pliable, and molten.
Although asteroid 2002DM passed Earth by a mere 121,500 Km/75,000 miles on June 14, 2002, it wasn't discovered until June 17. It's 100 yards wide and travels 37,260 Kph/23,000 mph. If it ever hits Earth, the explosion will be equal to one hydrogen bomb.
If a hydrogen atom was as wide as a football field its nucleus would be the size of a grain of sand located on the 50 yard line. Its electron (1,836 times lighter) would orbit at the one-yard lines.
How empty is space? Between the stars in the Milky Way there are about 10 hydrogen atoms in one cubic foot of space. A one-inch diameter core sampling between Earth and the star Vega, 25 light years away (150 trillion miles), would only contain as much matter as found in a large grain of sand.
The total mass of all the asteroids would equal the mass of the Moon.
Mars may have had blue oceans one billion years ago. It could again if humans make it like the Earth (teraforming). It would take hundreds of years to accomplish the feat.
Youngest supernova remnant is Cassiopeia A, 10,000 light years distant. It blew up 10 thousand years ago in 8,318 BC and wasn't visible by humans until AD1682.
The Sun is a large, dwarf star. It appears different because it is closer than other stars. It is 1,271,000 times larger than Earth.
Scaled down universe. If the Sun were the size of an electron, each galaxy would be the size of dinner plates separated by seven feet. All 100 billion galaxies in the universe would fill a volume 10,000 times the size of the interior of the Silver Dome in Pontiac, Michigan.
The Moon's gravity causes both water "and" land tides. When the Moon is overhead, the ground under your feet rises up as much as 6 inches.
If the Milky Way were the size of the United States, the solar system would fit inside a tea cup.
Apollo took 4 days to reach the Moon. Homo sapiens took 10,000 generations to get where it is today. It will take 18 million more generations before the Sun enters a warming spell in 500,000 AD. To survive that, we must either learn to adjust the internal workings of the Sun or move the planet Earth to another star system.
Million/billion/trillion. A million dollars stack 500 feet (tall as the big pyramid in Egypt); a billion dollars stack 10 times higher than Mt. Everest; a 1 trillion dollars stack 1/4 of the way to the Moon 60,000 miles (97,200 Km).
The idea of a Big Bang originated by the Belgian astronomer-priest George Lemaitre to described an expanding universe. The term Big Bang was coined by English astronomer Fred Hoyle to ridicule the theory.
If (star) Betelgeuse were a 20-story building, Earth would be the size of a period at the end of a sentence.
During the close fly-by of asteroid 433 Eros by NASA's Near-Earth-Asteroid-Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft, features as small as 2 feet (0.7 meters) wide were observed. On 2/14/01 NEAR landed on the asteroid.
Reduce a star to a grain of salt and the Milky Way would be 225 million miles (363 million Km) wide. On the average, individual stars would be 60 feet (21 meters) apart from one another.
762 Pulcova and 90 Antiope are rare "double" asteroids located 186 million miles/300 million Km from Earth. Each pair has been photograhed. A scale model of the system would have New York and Boston orbiting each other. Two other double asteroids are 45 Eugenia and 243 Ida.
M-44 Beehive, an open star cluster in Cancer and 570 light-years distant, may be 2 open clusters colliding.
Asteroid 2000 SG-344 (180 feet wide) has a 1 in 500 chance of colliding with Earth in 2030. The impact would have the energy of 100 World War II atom bombs.
An interesting coincidence. The number of inches in one mile equals the number of astronomical units in one light year. An astronomical unit is the Earth-Sun distance: 93 million miles or 150 million Km.
A "day" on Venus is equal to 243 days on Earth. A Venuss year equals 225 Earth-days. Soi, a Venus day is longer than its year. You could stay in sunlight by walking eastward briskly -- opposite Venus' rotation.
The universe weighs 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons.
Science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein, "Once you make it to orbit, you are half-way to anywhere."
Each second the Sun becomes 4 million tons lighter due to the conversion of mass into energy.
The coldest temperature possible is: -457° Fahrenheit, -273° Centigrade, 0° Kelvin.
Over 1/5 of the universe is hidden from view, blocked by the dust and stars in the Milky Way's disk.
Pluto is now being called a Kuiper Belt object. It is a planet only if we are willing to reclassify Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars as minor planets.
Andromeda Galaxy: To make a model of M 31 use grains of salt to represent each of its 200 billion stars. The model would be as wide as the distance from the Earth to the Moon, 385,560 Km/238,000 miles. Each grain of salt would be separated by 60 feet.
Murphy's Law. A term originated by a scientist named Murphy after the discovery that sensors being used in a rocket sled he was testing, had been installed backwards.
President Richard Nixon's name left on plaques on the lunar lanaders will be legible for 400,000 years.
-----Regards,----R.S. Kulkarni.
A hypothetical Mars with oceans a billion years ago
Snow flakes It takes a billion billion snow flakes to make a comet, and one billion comets to make a 'Pluto'.
A shocker Reduce the known universe to the size of the Earth and the portion of that universe in which humans can live, without wearing a space suit or living in a pressurized cabin, is about the size of a single atom.
Music in Space The universe resonates at a pitch that is 33,000 times lower that James Earl Jones: "This is CNN."
Kuiper Belt objects, a group of asteroids orbiting beyond the orbit of our outermost planet, Pluto, originated much closer to the Sun but were exiled into darkness by the gravity of the planet Neptune.
Einstein called it "spooky." Physicists call it entanglement. It appears that photons, electrons, and other elementry particles have the ability to interact with each other even when miles apart.
How many stars in the universe? 100 billion stars times 100 billion universes (on the average) equals 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. (10 followed by 21 zeros)
Hubble and the 100" telescope at Mt Wilson Calif. determined in the 1920s that the universe is expanding.
Poem: "The Cosmos, it seems, is full of surprises. The Sun doesn’t set -- the horizon rises."
String theory: Strings may be the smallest pieces of matter. If an atom were expanded to the size of the solar system, one string would be the size of a tree. See the next item for "super" strings.
Super Strings (SS) Faster-than-light travel is a possibility if starships can travel on yet-to-be-discovered SS. These objects may be concentrated strands of energy that crisscross the universe. SS may be as thin as atoms with a 3-foot-long piece of a SS weighing as much as the Earth.
Farthest object in the solar system? Three Kuiper Belt Objects -- worlds much like Pluto that orbit the Sun beyond Neptune. Each KBO 15-21 miles (25-45 km) with unexciting names of 2003 BF91, 2002 BG91, and 2003 BH91. These KBOs were discovered by the Hubble Telescope on Jan. 26, 2003.
Fathest planet in the universe? A Jupiter-size world 5,600 light years away orbits a binary star in a globular star cluster in Scorpio that is 13 billion year old and called M-4 . The binary system is a white dwarf and a neutron star. The planet, twice the mass of Jupiter, had to have been born around a sun-like star.
Star & Moon Music: Quiet Night and Stars, Moonlight Becomes You, When the Moon Hits Your Eye, Sunshine On My Shoulder, Hold On to the Night, In the Misty Moonlight, Moonlight Serenade, Fly Me to the Moon, Blue Moon, Shepherd Moons, Moon River, Pennies from Heaven, On Moonlight Bay, When You Wish Upon a Star, In the Chapel in the Moonlight, Paper Moon, Silver Moon, (send me your sugestions).
The universe is so big, light from its fathest regions hasn't reached Earth yet.
Life expectancy was 18 years for the first 99% of humanity's existence on Earth.
A Space Shuttle would take 82,000 years to travel 4.3 light years to the next star, Alpha Centauri.
Two Mars missions: Each has a golf-cart-size rover. Spirit will land early January 2004 in Gusev crater while Opportunity lands later that month, in Meridiani Planum on the opposite side of Mars. Specifications: Speed 0.1 m.p.h. (2 inches per second). Life expectancy of 93 days. Daily range of 131 feet or 40 meters.
The universe, crushed to the density of a neutron star, would fit inside the orbit of Mars
Longest year in history? Julius Caesar gave the year 46AD 445 days. This was to change Rome's innaccurate calendar to the one used today -- the Julian Calendar.
The most distant object -- a galaxy 13.6 billion light years away first seen by astronomers in 2002.
M51 is one of the few galaxies whose arms are visible through small telescopes to amateur observers.
Cosmic "branes" may be flat, parallel universes that occasionally "bang together" to recreate universes (like ours) within a much more vast structure that may never have had a beginning and may never have an end.
Quarks are not stars. The announcement of Quark stars was premature and a mistake.
5.4 minutes: the fastest that binary stars revolve around each other that are only six earth-diameters apart.
The star Altair is oblate because it rotates so fast -- 210 km/s (130 miles per second)
Most massive star measured to date is 57 times more massive than the Sun.
A Pulsar with planets? Yes, four 4 low mass planets have been discovered the orbiting Pulsar B1257+12
Windy star: Vegan winds extends 1.5 light years from this class A star.
Sodium is the first element discovered in an extra-solar planet's atmosphere. It orbits the star HD 209 548.
New Planets: As of November 2003 more than 110 planets have been discovered orbiting other stars in 11 multiple-planet systems. Of these, one orbits in a record breaking 2.9 days and one orbits a fairly compact binary system, Gamma Cephei. Each planet is a gas giant and larger than Jupiter.
The 12 newest stars found within 33 light-years of the Sun are in 9 systems: 7 single stars, 1 double system, and 1 triple system, bringing the total number of known stars (within 33 LY) to 336; made up of 228 systems.
Molecules: 120 have been found in dust clouds in space.
Comets eject meteoroids that become meteors. Meteors are the size of the eraser on a pencil.
Small diamonds are found in meteorites thought to originate near the Sun and not interstellar space
Ceres is the first asteroid to be photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Our Next Generation Telescope, the James T. Webb Telescope, is named in honor of a NASA administrator.
The Sloan Sky Survey mission is to photograph the entire sky. Its website has motion pictures and excellant information at http://skyserver.fnal.gov
Neutrinos have mass. The biggest news of the decade is that all three types of neutrinos (electron, muon, and tau) have been detected by the Sudbury neutrino detector and have turned physics on its "head".
A planet found in the constellation Orion? Yes, because of a fluke combination of Orion's upper corner extending into the Zodiac at the same time Saturn was traveling below the ecliptic.
French, ice-drilling cryobots may be sent to Mars in 2007 and also to Jupiter's moon Europa in 2008. They will search for microbes living beneath the ice surfaces. Each is 3.3 feet long and 5 inches wide.
The Astronomical League (made up of 240 American astronomy societies) will attach a 16-inch (40-cm) Cassegrain reflector telescope to the International Space Station by 2010 to be used by amateurs.
The color of the universe? A pale shade of green, somewhere between medium aquamarine and turquoise.
Digital tripod photography is possible with an expensive camera that allows manual focussing, manual selection of several-second exposures with its lens set as wide open as possible, ability to override the flash, and the ability to automatically shoot a dark frame after you take a timed exposure.
NASA's JIMO (Jupiter Icy Moon Orbiter) launches in 2007 to examine Jupiter and its moons in unprecedented detail, in particular the possible subsurface water oceans of moons Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.
Black Holes, regions of space so dense that light can't escape their gravitational pull, come in three sizes: small, medium, and large. Small ones have the mass of just a few suns and intermediate ones have the mass of several hundred suns. The largest black holes have the mass of several million suns.
The 2003 Mars opposition on Aug. 27, brought Earth and Mars closer than they have been since 57,617 B.C. The next closest opposition takes place in summer 2287.
More Jovian Moons. Jupiter now has more than 61 moons. New "possibles" are being tracked by University of Hawaii astronomers using giant telescopes on Mauna Kea. Each is 1 - 4 km ( 0.6 to 2.5 miles) wide.
Comets. The most comets discovered in a single photograph was by astronomer Carolyn Shoemaker -- 32.
Rings around the Earth? Possibly. Some 35 million years ago an asteroid may have grazed Earth at an oblique angle, plowing across the surface, then ricocheting away into the solar system. This threw material into space close to Earth that formed rings that persisted for 100,000 years. By blocking out sunshine at the equator, the rings caused weather changes and extinctions that mark the end ofthe Eocene Age.
Oh no! Planetary alignments! Don't fret. Nothing ever happens. Neither of the last 2 (Feb. 1962 & May 2000), when all planets lined up spanning 16° and 25° respectively, caused any kind of measurable effects.
Brown Dwarfs, (known as failed stars) are neither stars nor planets. they outnumber normal stars by 2 to 1 and seldom are found orbiting stars. Surprisingly, they are red, not brown; radiate their heat in infrared light; rotate in less than 1 hour; and have hydrogen cores (as opposed to planets that have rock-ice cores).
Blue moons are the 4th Full Moon in any 3-month season. They are not the 2nd Full Moon in any one month.
A new asteroid belt may lie between the orbits of Earth and Mars. Astronomers determined this after finding these three near-Earth asteroids in that zone: 1996 XB27, 1998 HG49, and 1998 KG3.
Comet Alert! In 1.4 million years the star GL 710, will dip into Earth's Oort (comet) Cloud and pass within 1.1 light years of the sun launching about 3 million comets on paths that will cross Earth's orbit.
Age of the universe? As of mid-2003: 13,700,000,000 years.
The Sun is a variable star that brightens and dims over an 11-year cycle with a mere 0.1 % change, but enough to change Earth's climate.
Both martian polar caps consist of water ice and traces of frozen carbon dioxide.
Coldest spot in the universe is the Boomerang Nebula in the constellation Centaurus. It is 5,000 LY distant and its temperature is -272° Centigrade. That is 1 degree warmer than absolute zero -- 0° Kelvin, or -273 C, or -457° F. The residual heat from the Big Bang's is 2° C warmer.
Saturn's rings, the thinnest objects known, compare to a 20-mile-wide CD disk of normal thickness.
The chances of our planet being hit by an asteroid large enough to do great damage to Earth is about the same as you being killed in an airplane crash -- 1 in 10,000.
The International Space Station weighs 170 tons, is 50 meters long (150 feet), and travels 7 kilometers per second (4 mps) at a heighth of 400 Km (250 miles).
The 300-foot-wide radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, has the capability of receiving a cell phone call from the planet Jupiter 631 million kilometers (390 million miles) away.
None of the Apollo equipment left behind on the Moon is visible with Earth-based telescopes.
Latest map of the universe: the 1998-2002 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey reaches out 3 billion light years, covers 5% of the sky, and studies red shifts of 246,677 galaxies and 30,0000 quasars.
NASA's Galileo was crashed into Jupiter in September 2003 to protect the moon Europa from contamination.
The closest star to Earth is the Sun.
The closest star to the Sun is Proxima Centauri a yellow-red dwarf orbiting the Alpha Centauri binary star system. Proxima is 13,000 times dimmer than the Sun and 4.2 light-years away -- 1/10th light year closer than either Alpha Centauri 1 or 2. They are 4.4 LY from Earth. Proxima has no planets.
Most common star systems are binary with each star separated by a Sun to Neptune distance.
Reddest star: Mu Cephei (the Garnet Star) a red supergiant with a diameter equal to the Earth-Sun distance. If it took the Sun’s place, its surface would reach out to the planet Saturn.
Fastest moving star: the pulsar PSR 2224+65 moves 1,600 kps of 1,000 mps.
Saturn is at opposition with its rings wide open on Dec. 3, 2003. This offers the best view of its rings in decades.
The "beginning" of dinosaurs may also be linked to an asteroid strike 200 million years ago.
New Discovery: Quauor (kwah-wahr). This 800-mile-wide-object, 1/2 the size of Pluto, and made of ice and rock, is a cousin to the planet Pluto, Quauor is a "Kuiper Belt Object" located in the Kuiper Belt past the planet Neptune about 4 billion miles out from the Sun. It and 300 similar objects, including Pluto, are called Plutinos because they keep a 2 to 3 resonance with Neptune.
The solar system's edge is 55 astronomical units or 5 billion miles or 8 billion km from the Sun.
The Moon's core is about 400 miles in diameter, highly pliable, and molten.
Although asteroid 2002DM passed Earth by a mere 121,500 Km/75,000 miles on June 14, 2002, it wasn't discovered until June 17. It's 100 yards wide and travels 37,260 Kph/23,000 mph. If it ever hits Earth, the explosion will be equal to one hydrogen bomb.
If a hydrogen atom was as wide as a football field its nucleus would be the size of a grain of sand located on the 50 yard line. Its electron (1,836 times lighter) would orbit at the one-yard lines.
How empty is space? Between the stars in the Milky Way there are about 10 hydrogen atoms in one cubic foot of space. A one-inch diameter core sampling between Earth and the star Vega, 25 light years away (150 trillion miles), would only contain as much matter as found in a large grain of sand.
The total mass of all the asteroids would equal the mass of the Moon.
Mars may have had blue oceans one billion years ago. It could again if humans make it like the Earth (teraforming). It would take hundreds of years to accomplish the feat.
Youngest supernova remnant is Cassiopeia A, 10,000 light years distant. It blew up 10 thousand years ago in 8,318 BC and wasn't visible by humans until AD1682.
The Sun is a large, dwarf star. It appears different because it is closer than other stars. It is 1,271,000 times larger than Earth.
Scaled down universe. If the Sun were the size of an electron, each galaxy would be the size of dinner plates separated by seven feet. All 100 billion galaxies in the universe would fill a volume 10,000 times the size of the interior of the Silver Dome in Pontiac, Michigan.
The Moon's gravity causes both water "and" land tides. When the Moon is overhead, the ground under your feet rises up as much as 6 inches.
If the Milky Way were the size of the United States, the solar system would fit inside a tea cup.
Apollo took 4 days to reach the Moon. Homo sapiens took 10,000 generations to get where it is today. It will take 18 million more generations before the Sun enters a warming spell in 500,000 AD. To survive that, we must either learn to adjust the internal workings of the Sun or move the planet Earth to another star system.
Million/billion/trillion. A million dollars stack 500 feet (tall as the big pyramid in Egypt); a billion dollars stack 10 times higher than Mt. Everest; a 1 trillion dollars stack 1/4 of the way to the Moon 60,000 miles (97,200 Km).
The idea of a Big Bang originated by the Belgian astronomer-priest George Lemaitre to described an expanding universe. The term Big Bang was coined by English astronomer Fred Hoyle to ridicule the theory.
If (star) Betelgeuse were a 20-story building, Earth would be the size of a period at the end of a sentence.
During the close fly-by of asteroid 433 Eros by NASA's Near-Earth-Asteroid-Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft, features as small as 2 feet (0.7 meters) wide were observed. On 2/14/01 NEAR landed on the asteroid.
Reduce a star to a grain of salt and the Milky Way would be 225 million miles (363 million Km) wide. On the average, individual stars would be 60 feet (21 meters) apart from one another.
762 Pulcova and 90 Antiope are rare "double" asteroids located 186 million miles/300 million Km from Earth. Each pair has been photograhed. A scale model of the system would have New York and Boston orbiting each other. Two other double asteroids are 45 Eugenia and 243 Ida.
M-44 Beehive, an open star cluster in Cancer and 570 light-years distant, may be 2 open clusters colliding.
Asteroid 2000 SG-344 (180 feet wide) has a 1 in 500 chance of colliding with Earth in 2030. The impact would have the energy of 100 World War II atom bombs.
An interesting coincidence. The number of inches in one mile equals the number of astronomical units in one light year. An astronomical unit is the Earth-Sun distance: 93 million miles or 150 million Km.
A "day" on Venus is equal to 243 days on Earth. A Venuss year equals 225 Earth-days. Soi, a Venus day is longer than its year. You could stay in sunlight by walking eastward briskly -- opposite Venus' rotation.
The universe weighs 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons.
Science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein, "Once you make it to orbit, you are half-way to anywhere."
Each second the Sun becomes 4 million tons lighter due to the conversion of mass into energy.
The coldest temperature possible is: -457° Fahrenheit, -273° Centigrade, 0° Kelvin.
Over 1/5 of the universe is hidden from view, blocked by the dust and stars in the Milky Way's disk.
Pluto is now being called a Kuiper Belt object. It is a planet only if we are willing to reclassify Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars as minor planets.
Andromeda Galaxy: To make a model of M 31 use grains of salt to represent each of its 200 billion stars. The model would be as wide as the distance from the Earth to the Moon, 385,560 Km/238,000 miles. Each grain of salt would be separated by 60 feet.
Murphy's Law. A term originated by a scientist named Murphy after the discovery that sensors being used in a rocket sled he was testing, had been installed backwards.
President Richard Nixon's name left on plaques on the lunar lanaders will be legible for 400,000 years.
-----Regards,----R.S. Kulkarni.
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