Some Interesting Facts About Space - 1!!!

As has been famously said, space is that the finalfrontier. the best of unknowns, space is way vasterthan we will comprehend, and crammed with phenomenon we barely understand. While we've been watching the heavens in awefor millenia, space exploration and discovery only began in earnest within the mid 20th century. Yet even what are not any doubt our primitive findingsstill point at a universe more incredible than we ever thought. 

• Until 1923 scientists thought that the entireuniverse was just our milky way- until astronomer Hubble discovered that the astronomicalfeature referred to as Andromeda, a fuzzy spot within the night sky, was actually a whole othergalaxy! Overnight the dimensions of the universe was effectivelydoubled!

• Hubble made his discovery from the Hookertelescope, built atop a mountain in California- it had been the primary mountain top telescope inthe world and at the time, a fantastic feat of engineering.

• To live the space between galaxies inspace, astronomers use Cepheids, or stars that periodically dim and brighten. Henrietta Leavitt discovered that by monitoringthe time it took these stars to dim and brighten you'll calculate how distant they were. 

• Leavitt's discovery of the way to calculate distancebased on the cycling of Cepheid stars allowed Hubble to prove that Andromeda was locatedoutside the Milky Way , and was thus its own galaxy. 

• Hubble scanned Andromeda for nights on endlooking for Cepheid stars, until finally discovering one in October 1923. After monitoring it for every week , he used Leavitt'sformula and determined it had been indeed located outside the Milky Way . 

• In 2011 the Hubble Space Telescope captureda picture of that star, called “Variable Number One”- or V1. it's been called “the most vital starin the history of cosmology.” 

• The most well liked planet in our system isnot Mercury as most would assume, but Venus. thanks to runaway heating , Venus' temperatureis a fantastic 863 degrees Fahrenheit (462 degrees celsius).  Not only is Venus' atmosphere blazing hot,but it also has an air pressure 92 times greater than the Earth's- that wouldcrush you flat as a can if you walked on its surface!

• In 1966 the Soviet Union's Venera 3 was thefirst man-made craft to land on Venus. Unfortunately its communications system hadfailed long before reaching Venus and it had been unable to relay back any data.

• Although it crash-landed and didn't send anydata back home, Venera 3 is that the first human-made object to impact another planet's surface.

• On the 18thof October 1967, Venera 4 becamethe first spacecraft to live the atmosphere of another planet. The soviets initially claimed the craft reachedthe surface intact, but when the American Mariner 5 spacecraft flew by Venus the verynext day, it measured a surface pressure of 75-100 atmospheres, stream of the rangeof Venera's 4 25 atmosphere hull strength. The claim by the Soviet Union was quicklyredacted.

• Venus's atmosphere is so dense, that parachutesare only necessary to hamper . The Soviet Union's Venera 9 released its parachutesat an atmospheric height of 31 miles (50km) and landed at a speed of only 15 mph (7 m/s). it had been also the primary space craft to transmitphotos from another planet!

• Our system is about 4.6 billion yearsold, and scientists believe it'll last another 5 billion years before our sun turns intoa red giant star .

• The tallest mountain known to man is OlympusMons, an extinct volcano on Mars with a peak 15 miles (25 km) high. it's nearly 3 times larger than Everest .

• A light-weight year is that the distance light travelsin one year, or 5.88 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

• The width of our Milky Way galaxy accordingto NASA is about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers, or 621371192237333888 miles- orin astronomical terms: 100,000 light years.

• Because most stars are thus far away, when youlook up into the night sky you're not seeing them as they currently are, but as they werethousands of years ago- that's how long their light takes to succeed in us!

• Our sun is 300,000 times larger than the world ,but within the universe it is a light weight.

• The most important star within the known universe isVY Canis Majoris- it's 1,400 times larger than our own sun! If you stuck it in our system it wouldextend all the well beyond Jupiter.

• Red Giants are really old stars that formwhen stars 10 times the mass of our sun runs out of hydrogen in its core. because it collapses the hydrogen within the outershells begin the method of fusion, and therefore the entire star begins fusing hydrogen all atonce. they're going to burn through all their fuel in justa few million years- unlike the billions it takes our sun- and shine 100,000 times brighterthan our sun!

• These stars often explode as a Supernova-the most powerful explosion within the universe.

• The original universe consisted solely ofhydrogen and helium- every other element on the periodic table and every single thingyou see around you today was formed in the heart of exploding stars.

• That's because when a star goes supernovait releases huge amounts of energy and neutrons, which produces heavier elements. The carbon in your body and the gold in thejewelry you wear were all made from exploding stars!

• Only hydrogen and helium were formed fromthe Big Bang- next time you suck down helium from a party balloon you are sucking downa gas that probably formed just 3 minutes after the Big Bang!