125 Amazing Facts about Space, Planets and Universe

1. Saturn's moon Titan has plenty of evidence of organic (life) chemicals in its atmosphere.

2. Life is known to exist only on Earth, but in 1986 NASA found what they thought might be fossils of microscopic living things in a rock from Mars.

3. Most scientists say life's basic chemicals formed on the Earth. The astronomer Fred Hoyle said they came from space.

4. Oxygen is circulated around the helmet in space suits in order to prevent the visor from misting.

5. The middle layers of space suits are blown up like a balloon to press against the astronaut's body. Without this pressure, the astronaut's body would boil!

6. The gloves included in the space suit have silicon rubber fingertips which allow the astronaut some sense of touch.

7. The full cost of a spacesuit is about $11 million although 70% of this is for the backpack and the control module.

8. Ever wondered how the pull of gravity is calculated between heavenly bodies? It's simple. Just multiply their masses together, and then divide the total by the square of the distance between them.

9. Glowing nebulae are named so because they give off a dim, red light, as the hydrogen gas in them is heated by radiation from the nearby stars.

10. The Drake Equation was proposed by astronomer Frank Drake to work out how many civilizations there could be in our galaxy - and the figure is in millions.

11. SETI is the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence - the program that analyzes radio signals from space for signs of intelligent life.

12. The Milky Way galaxy we live in: is one among the BILLIONS in space.

13. The Milky Way galaxy is whirling rapidly, spinning our sun and all its other stars at around 100 million km per hour.

14. The Sun travels around the galaxy once every 200 million years – a journey of 100,000 light years.

15. There may be a huge black hole in the very middle of the most of the galaxies.

16. The Universe is probably about 15 billion years old, but the estimations vary.

17. One problem with working out the age of the Universe is that there are stars in our galaxy which are thought to be 14 to 18 billion years old – older than the estimated age of the Universe. So, either the stars must be younger, or the Universe older.

18. The very furthest galaxies are spreading away from us at more than 90% of the speed of light.
19. 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.

20. The Universe may have neither a centre nor an edge, because according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, gravity bends all of space time around into an endless curve.

21. If you fell into a black hole, you would stretch like spaghetti.

22. Matter spiraling into a black hole is torn apart and glows so brightly that it creates the brightest objects in the Universe – quasars.

23. The swirling gases around a black hole turn it into an electrical generator, making it spout jets of electricity billions of kilometers out into space.

24. The opposite of black holes are estimated to be white holes which spray out matter and light like fountains.

25. A day in Mercury lasts approximately as long as 59 days on earth.