Although Galileo is given credit for discovering the telescope, he actually was just the first to use it to study the sky.
Only 5% of the matter in the universe can be seen.
The Universe is probably about 14 billion years old, but the estimations vary.
The Universe was once thought to be everything that could ever exist, but recent theories
about inflation (e.g. Big Bang) suggest our universe may be just one of countless bubbles
of space time.
Shooting stars are actually shining dust particles left behind by comets in the atmosphere.
The Universe may have neither a center nor an edge, because according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, gravity bends all of space time around into an endless curve.
According to the best estimates of astronomers, 275 million new stars are born every single day.
There are parts of the universe that simply cannot be seen or detected and scientists refer to these parts as dark matter and dark energy.
33 light years away there is an exoplanet completely covered in burning ice.
There is water reservoir floating in space that is equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world’s ocean.
Ten thousand light years from earth in a constellation far, far away, there is massive cloud of alcohol.This interstellar cloud of gas and dust contains over a billion billion billion liters of vinyl alcohol.
Although our Sun looks round, it actually has flat sides on its top and bottom.
In 2004 scientists discovered the largest diamond ever. In fact it’s a collapsed star. Measuring 4000 km across and having a core composed of 10 billion trillion trillion carats it’s roughly 50 light years from the Earth.
NASA scientists have discovered stars that are cool enough to touch.
Galaxy’s centre tastes of raspberries and smells of rum, say astronomers.As improbable as this sounds, the discovery was made when astronomers from the Max Plank Institute used the IRAM radio telescope in Spain to study Sagittarius B2, a dust cloud near the center of the galaxy.Among the chemicals for which signals were found was ethyl formate (C3H6O2), the dominant flavor in raspberries, as well as an important one in rum.
The Sun makes up more than 99% of the mass of our Solar System.
Though it is impossible to smell space directly or through a spacesuit, astronauts report that upon returning from a spacewalk, their gear smells distinctively like seared steak, hot metal, and arc welding fumes.
Black hole is a region of space having a gravitational field so intense that no matter or radiation can escape.
The age of the universe is roughly 13.7 billion years old.
Matter spiraling into a black hole is torn apart and glows so brightly that it creates the brightest objects in the Universe – quasars.
Although the Big Bang theory is widely accepted, the events that occurred before Big Bang remains a very big mystery.
There are billions of galaxies in the universe.
Although the planets within the universe are not flat, it is believed that the universe is flat.
Quasars emit so much energy that they can actually drown out other energy from other objects in the same galaxy.
The opposite of black holes are estimated to be white holes which spray out matter and light like fountains.
Because the universe is cooling as it expands, scientists believe that it will end in a Big Freeze.
When analog television sets aren’t tuned to a channel correctly, it results in static and white noise. Around 1% of that is radiation left over from the Big Bang, better known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). This interference between overlapping signals actually allowed Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson to discover the CMB in 1965.
Once every second a star somewhere in the universe explodes.
Planets have magnetic field around them because of the liquid iron in their cores. As the planets rotate, so the iron swirls, generating electric currents that create the magnetic field.
The Big Bang theory tells us that the universe began as a small, hot ball that cooled as it expanded.
Pulsars is a celestial object, thought to be a rapidly rotating neutron star, that emits regular pulses of radio waves and other electromagnetic radiation at rates of up to one thousand pulses per second.
Pulsars probably result from a supernova explosion – that is why most are found in the flat disc of the Milky Way, where supernovae occur.
Our Solar System takes 225 million years to rotate around the Milky Way.The last time Earth was in its current position, dinosaurs were just beginning to roam the Earth.
Models of the universe began with observations made by ancient Greek philosophers.
In 1977, we recived a signal from deep space that lasted 72 seconds. We still don’t know how or where it came for.This signal is known as wow signal.
Black holes are objects that suck up everything in space including light.
As a result of the aforementioned fact that light cannot exceed 186,000 miles per second, it would follow that nothing can, which is exactly why this has come to be known as the universal speed limit.
The brightest star in each constellation is called the Alpha Star, the next brightest Beta, and so on.
A sample of Sir Isaac Newton’s apple tree was sent into space to ‘defy gravity.’
