Interesting astronomy facts

October 23, 2009 | In: Space Facts

The Sun is around 4.5 billion years old.

The center of the Sun is called the core.

There are stars that are over 600,000 times as bright as the Sun.

The biggest star is VY Canis Majoris, a red hypergiant 5000 light years from the Solar System.

Mercury can be as cold as 300 degrees below zero.

One day on Jupiter is only 9 hours and 55 minutes.

Earth’s galaxy, the Milky Way, contains about 400 billion stars.

There are nine identified planets in our solar system. They are in the order as they appear moving towards from the sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.

Every year the moon is moving away from the Earth by 3 cm.

A lunar eclipse is the opposite of a solar eclipse.

Light from the sun takes 8 minutes to reach you, thus you see the sun as it was 8 minutes ago.

Proxima Centauri is the closest star to our solar system and is nearly 4 light years away.

If you could travel at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) it would take 100,000 years to cross our galaxy!

Earth doesn’t take 24 hours to rotate on its axis. It’s actually 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds .

Lots of people, in fact about 13% of those asked in 1988, still believed the Moon to be made of cheese.

Saturn’s rings consist mostly of chunks of ice, ranging in size from microscopic (too small to see) grains to boulders as big as a house.

The study of Saturn’s rings began with Galileo’s discovery in 1610, and continues today with the help of the Voyager spacecraft and the Hubble Space Telescope.

You can identify the planets by looking for these colors:

* The Sun is bright yellow.
* Mercury is white.
* Venus is dull yellow.
* Earth is blue.
* Mars is red.
* Jupiter is pink.
* Saturn is yellow and far from the sun.
* Uranus is light blue.
* Neptune is blue and far from the sun.
* Pluto is purple.

The times around the sun are true scale to each other. The distances apart from each other and the sun are also true scale (except that the outer planets; Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto have been cut in half (that is, they would need to be twice as far to be to scale).

The sizes of the planets are true to relative scale (not actual scale as they would be less than a pixel) except: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are 2x their true relative radius. Pluto is about 35x its true radius (since Pluto is so tiny). The sun is also not to scale.