Thursday, December 31, 2009

Cool Space Facts


Everyone loves facts about the space.Everyone is intrigued by it .The chapter on space in the science books always seems the easiest one ,why? Because it's always interesting .
I was 'stumbling' around when i saw a cool space fact which inspired me to look up even more of them.Here are some of the ones i liked:


If you put Saturn in water it would float
The density of Saturn is so low that if you were to put it in a giant glass of water it would float. The actual density of Saturn is 0.687 g/cm3 while the density of water is 0.998 g/cm3. At the equator Saturn has a radius of 60,268 ± 4 km – which means you would need an extremely large glass of water to test this out.
      The light hitting the earth right now is 30 thousand years old
The energy in the sunlight we see today started out in the core of the Sun 30,000 years ago – it spent most of this time passing through the dense atoms that make the sun and just 8 minutes to reach us once it had left the Sun! The temperature at the core of the sun is 13,600,000 kelvins. All of the energy produced by fusion in the core must travel through many successive layers to the solar photosphere before it escapes into space as sunlight or kinetic energy of particles.

The Sun loses up to a billion kilograms a second due to solar winds
Solar winds are charged particles that are ejected from the upper surface of the sun due to the high temperature of the corona and the high kinetic energy particles gain through a process that is not well understood at this time. Also, did you know that 1 pinhead of the sun’s energy is enough to kill a person at a distance of 160 kilometers?
         The moon is drifting away from Earth
Every year the moon moves about 3.8cm further away from the Earth. This is caused by tidal effects. Consequently, the earth is slowing in rotation by 24 leap seconds since 1972. Scientists do not know how the moon was created, but the generally accepted theory suggests that a large Mars sized object hit the earth causing the Moon to splinter off.
 If two pieces of metal touch in space, they become permanently stuck together
This may sound unbelievable, but it is true. Two pieces of metal without any coating on them will form in to one piece in the vacuum of space. This doesn’t happen on earth because the atmosphere puts a layer of oxidized material between the surfaces. This might seem like it would be a big problem on the space station but as most tools used there have come from earth, they are already coated with material. In fact, the only evidence of this seen so far has been in experiments designed to provoke the reaction. This process is called cold welding.
There are over 20 million observable meteors per day.

Out of these,only one or two meteorites per day reach the surface of Earth. The largest found meteorite was found in Hoba, Namibia. It weighed 60 tons. The typical size of a meteor is about one cubic centimeter, which is equivalent to the size of a sugar cube.Each day, Earth accumulate 10 to 100 tons of material.
You might be thinking if the above fact is true,then what is all the fuss about 'rocks' hitting the earth?
Those are asteroids.The most dangerous asteroids, those capable of causing major regional or global disasters, usually impact the Earth only once every 100,000 years on average. Some large asteroids even have their own moon. The orbits of most asteroids lie partially between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
 In space, any free moving liquid will form itself into a sphere.
This happens due to surface tension.The liquid tends to acquire minimum possible surface area  for its volume.

 If you shouted in space quite literally no one could hear you scream – even if they were standing/floating right next to you.
The reason for this is the absence of atmosphere or one should say a medium for the sound waves to travel.

If you fold a piece of A4 paper in half 44 times it will reach the moon
If a piece of paper is 0.1mm thick,then the effective thickness doubles on folding.Thus on folding 44 times it will be 2^44 times which is then multiplied by 0.1mm which gives 1.76 million kilometers.

Proving that women love to do things differently, Venus is the only planet to rotate clockwise.
When Apollo 11’s lunar module touched down on the moon, it had just 20 seconds of fuel left on board.

Most popular post on this blog:
20 Lines That Could Have Dramatically Changed “The Lord of the Rings”

6 comments:

Alexa said...

The "cold welding" concept to me is just staggering! I had never heard of this phenomena before (two pieces of metal becoming permanently affixed in outer space), and I found myself fascinated by this. God thing NASA was aware of this in advance of the Apollo missions or there could have been an accidental disaster.

Good post my friend earned you a thumbs up on SU and a bookmark. Keep up the good work!!

My Space said...

Thanks alexa.
the 'cold welding' one new for me too.

punkersdanielle said...

Hey! I happened upon your blog b/c of the fbook networked blogs app... I have to say at first I was like.. ugh, space facts? Never mind... Skim quickly... But then I was like... Saturn would float? That totally made my day. Thanks. :-)

My Space said...

@-dan-d-
I am glad you liked it and i hope you checked the articles related to LOTR as you seem to be a fan of LOTR according to your profile

jose said...

there is a GIRL that live in canada and she play ROBLOX

Anonymous said...

The Venus joke isn't true, Uranus also rotates Clockwise