Most People Don’t Realize These 18 Strange Things About Space

 

There have been some great space movies recently: from Gravity to Interstellar, it seems like everyone’s got space on the brain. And there’s good reason, too: space is awesome. Whether you’ve got dreams of space travel or just like to think about space, you’re sure to be floored by these 18 mind-blowing facts.

1.) The sun burns at about 9,941 degrees Fahrenheit.

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Flickr

2.) There’s more than one moon orbiting Earth; there are six satellite asteroids currently orbiting Earth, including Earth’s “second moon”,  Cruithne.

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Flickr

3.) A recently discovered planet was overlooked for 21 years, lost in the glare of a supernova.

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Hubble Site

4.) 4.5 billion years ago, Earth was hit by something about the size of Mars.

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NASA

5.) There’s been a storm brewing on Jupiter for 200 years. Known as the Great Red Spot, it’s 40,000 km-wide and could fit three Earths inside of it.

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Flickr

6.) The Earth could fit inside the sun 300,000 times and then some!

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NASA

7.) For a photon to travel from the core of the sun to the surface takes 170,000 years.

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NASA

8.) Once it’s at the surface, though, it only takes 8 years to reach Earth.

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NASA

9.) Every 200 million years the Sun completes its revolution around the galaxy.

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Flickr

10.) Here’s a trippy thought: you can fit all of the planets in the solar system in between Earth and the Moon.

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Imgur

11.) Astronauts left a mirror on the Moon’s surface during the Moon landing. Scientists used this mirror to bounce a laser off it and accurately measure the distance to the Earth.

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Flickr

12.) In the last 20 years, we’ve discovered over 1,000 planets.

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ESO

13.) Jupiter is HUGE! It’s 2.5 times the size of every other planet in the solar system…combined.

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NASA

14.) There have been three human deaths in space.

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Flickr

15.) Mars is home to a volcano the size of Ireland; it’s the largest in the whole solar system at 21 km high and 60 km wide.

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Flickr

16.) If you went to the moon tomorrow, you could see the footprints left in 1969 by Apollo 11.

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NASA

17.)  99.86% of all mass in our solar system consists of the Sun.

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Flickr

18.) The Andromeda Galaxy is visible to the human eye on a clear night; it’s only about 2.2 million light years away.

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Flickr