AstroFacts
A
hypothetical Mars with oceans a billion years ago
Snow
flakes: It takes a billion billion snow flakes
to make a comet and one billion comets to make an
object like Pluto.
Reduce
the universe to the size of the Earth
and the part of the universe we humans can live
in without having to wear a space suit or live in
a pressurized compartment is about the size of a one
atom.
Music
in Space: The universe resonates at a pitch
that is 33,000 times lower than the voice of James
Earl Jones saying, "This is CNN."
Kuiper
Belt objects: a group of asteroids orbiting
past Pluto originated closer to the Sun and then
exiled into darkness by the gravity of the planet
Neptune.
"Spooky,"
Einstein called it. Physicists call it 'entanglement'.
It appears that photons, electrons, and other elementry
particles have the ability to interact with each other
even when they are miles apart.
How
many stars in the universe? 100 billion stars
times 100 billion galaxies, or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
In
the 1920s, Edwin Hubble, using the 100-inch
telescope at Mt. Wilson, Calif. determined that
the universe is expanding - later to be known as the
big bang.
The
Cosmos truly is full of surprises. The Sun
doesn’t set, the horizon rises.
String
theory: Strings may be the smallest pieces
of matter. If an atom were expanded to the size of
the solar system, 1 string would be the size of a
tree.
Super
Strings (SS). Faster-than-light travel may
be a possibility if starships can travel on (yet-to-be-discovered)
SS, concentrated strands of energy as thin as
atoms and crisscrossing the universe. A
3-foot-long length of a SS could weigh as
much as the Earth.
Farthest
objects in the solar system? Three Kuiper
Belt Objects, similar to Pluto, orbit the
Sun past Neptune. Until now, the 20-mile-wide
KBOs have are only called 2003 BF91, 2002 BG91,
and 2003 BH91. Have any suggestions?
Fathest
planet. A Jupiter-size world 5,600 light
years away orbits binary star system M4, a 13-billion-year-old star
cluster in Scorpio. The white dwarf and neutron
star planet is twice the mass of Jupiter.
Space
Songs: Quiet Night and Quiet Stars, Moonlight
Becomes You, When the Moon Hits Your Eye, Sunshine
On My Shoulder, Hold On to the Night, In the Misty
Moonlight, Moonlight Serenade, Fly Me to the Moon,
Shepherd Moons, Blue Moon, Moon River, On Moonlight
Bay, When You Wish Upon a Star, In the Chapel in the
Moonlight, Paper Moon, and Silver Moon. (send me sugestions)
How
big's the universe? Light from its fathest
region hasn't reached Earth.
Space
Shuttles would take 82,000 years to travel
the 4.3 light years to the closest star, Alpha Centauri.
The
universe, crushed to the density of a neutron
star, would fit inside the orbit of Mars
Longest
year in history? Julius Caesar gave 46AD
445 days in order to correct Rome's calendar
to the one we use today, the Julian alendar.
Most
distant object in the Universe? A galaxy
13.6 billion light years away.
Cosmic
branes may be flat, parallel universes occasionally
"banging together" to recreate universes that
are all located within a much more vast structure
that may never have had a beginning and may never
have an end.
Quarks
are not stars. The announcement of Quark
stars was a mistake.
Shortest
binary star orbit is 5.4 minutes. The two
stars are separated by a mere 48,000 miles -
six earth-diameters.
The
star Altair is oblate because it rotates
so fast - 130 miles per second
Most
massive star measured is 57 times more massive
than the Sun.
A
Pulsar with planets? Yes. Four low-mass planets
have been discovered orbiting Pulsar B1257+12
Windy. Winds
extend out 1.5 light years from the star Vega.
Sodium
is the first element discovered in the atmosphere
of an extra-solar planet. It orbits the star HD 209
548.
New
Planets: So far 180+ planets have been detected
orbiting other stars.
Molecules:
120 have been found in dust clouds in space.
Comets
eject material that become meteors if a piece hits
Earth.
Meteors
seen in the night sky are only the size of a pencil
eraser.
Ceres.
The first asteroid to be photographed by Hubble
Space Telescope.
The
Sloan Sky Survey mission will photograph
the entire sky. Its website offers motion pictures
and information at http://skyserver.fnal.gov
Our
Saturn seen in Orion? Yes. It was
a fluke. Orion's upper corner extends into the Zodiac
and Saturn was traveling a little below the ecliptic.
French,
ice-drilling cryobots may be sent to Mars
in 2007 and Jupiter's moon Europa in 2008 searching
for microbes beneath the ice.
The
Astronomical League, 240 astronomy
clubs, will place a 16" telescope in the International
Space Station to be used by amateur astronomers.
Digital
tripod photography is possible with cameras allowing
manual focussing and manual selection of multi-second
exposures. Set the lens as wide open as possible
to override the flash. It must have the ability to
automatically shoot a dark frame after you take a
timed exposure.
Black
Holes, regions of space so dense light can't
escape the gravitational pull, come in small,
medium, and large. Small (the mass of) a
few suns, medium with several hundred suns, and
large with several million suns.
The
Mars opposition on 8/27/03 brought
Mars closer to Earth than it had been since 57,617
B.C. The next closest will be the summer of 2287.
Jupiter
now has 67 moons. New "possibles" are being tracked using telescopes
on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
Saturn
now has 34 moons.
Most
comets discovered on one photograph - 32
by Carolyn Shoemaker.
Planetary
alignments. Nothing ever happens. Neither
of the last two caused any measurable effects
when in Feb. 1962 & May 2000 all the planets lined
up and spanned an area of the sky 16° and 25° respectively,
Brown
Dwarfs, failed stars, are neither stars nor
planets. They outnumber normal stars by 2 to 1. They
are red (not brown), radiate their heat in infrared
light, rotate in less than an hour, and have hydrogen
cores.
Blue
moons are the fourth Full Moon in any three-month
season and not, customarilly believed, the secondnd
Full Moon in any month.
A
new asteroid belt may lie between the orbits
of Earth and Mars. Astronomers determined this after
finding these three near-Earth asteroids in that zone:
1996 XB27, 1998 HG49, and 1998 KG3.
Comet
Alert. In 1.4 million years a star GL 710,
will pass the sun, dip into the Oort comet cloud, and
launch millions of comets that will cross Earth's
orbit.
Age
of the universe? 13.7 billion years.
The
Sun is a variable star that brightens and
dims over an 11-year cycle and slightly changes
Earth's climate.
Martian
polar caps consist of water ice and traces
of frozen carbon dioxide.
Coldest
spot in the universe: the Boomerang Nebula
(5,000 LY distant) in the constellation Centaurus
is -272° C. (1 degree warmer than absolute zero).
Saturn's
rings are the thinnest objects known. A model
would be a 20-mile-wide CD disk of normal thickness.
Incoming!
The chance of Earth being hit by an asteroid large
enough to do great damage is about the same as you
being killed in a plane -- 1 in 10,000.
International
Space Station travels 4 miles a
second 250 miles overhead.
The
Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico can
receive a cell phone call from the planet Jupiter 390
million miles away. No collect calls please.
Apollo
equipment on the Moon isn't visible
with Earth-based elescopes.
NASA's
Galileo spacecraft was crashed into Jupiter
in September 2003 to protect the moon Europa from
possible contamination.
The
closest star to Earth? The Sun.
The
closest star to the Sun? Proxima Centauri
in the Alpha Centauri trinary star system. It is 13,000
times dimmer than the Sun and 4.2 light-years away.
Most stars are
binary with each star separated by a Sun-Neptune distance.
Reddest
star: Mu Cephei (the Garnet Star) a red supergiant
with a diameter equal to the Earth-Sun distance. If
it took the Sun’s place, its surface would reach out
to the planet Saturn.
Fastest star: pulsar
PSR 2224+65 moves 1,000 miles per second.
Beginning
of dinosaurs may be linked to an asteroid strike
200 million BC.
Quauor
(kwah-wahr) 800-miles-wide is made of ice and
rock and is a Kuiper Belt Object (located past Neptune)
about 4 billion miles from the Sun. It and 300
similar objects, including Pluto, are called Plutinos.
The
Moon's core is about 400 miles in diameter,
highly pliable, and molten.
Asteroid
2002DM passed Earth by 75,000 miles
on 6/14/02 but wasn't found until June 17. It's
100 yards wide and travels 23,000 mph. If it
ever hits Earth, the explosion will be equal to a
hydrogen bomb.
Enlarge
a hydrogen atom to a football field.
Its nucleus would be the size of a grain of sand on
the 50 yard line. Its electron would orbit at the
1-yard lines.
How
empty is space? Between the stars there
are 10 hydrogen atoms in one cubic foot of space.
The
total mass of all the asteroids would equal
the mass of the Moon.
Mars
probably had blue oceans 1billion years ago
and may again if we make it like the Earth (teraforming).
It would take hundreds of years.
Youngest
supernova remnant: Cassiopeia A; 10,000 light
years away; blew up 10 thousand years ago in 8,318
BC; wasn't visible until AD1682.
The
Sun, a large dwarf star, is 1,271,000
times larger than Earth.
Scaled
down. If the Sun was the size of an electron, galaxies
would be the size of dinner plates separated by seven
feet and all 100 billion galaxies in the universe
would fill a volume 10,000 times the size of a football
stadium.
The
Moon's gravity causes tides on both
the water and land. When the Moon is overhead,
the ground under it rises up 6 inches.
If
the Milky Way was as big as the US,
the solar system would fit in a tea cup.
Humans
took 10,000 generations to get where we are today.
In another 18 million generations the
Sun enters a warm spell (500,000 AD). We'll have
to adjust the Sun's internal workings or move Earth
to another star system.
Million,
billion, trillion. One million dollars stacks
up 500 feet - as tall as the big pyramid in Egypt.
One billion dollars is 10 times higher than Mt.
Everest. One trillion dollars is 1/4 of the way to
the Moon or 60,000 miles.
The
idea of the Big Bang came from the Belgian
astronomer-priest George Lemaitre to describe an expanding
universe. The term Big Bang came from English
astronomer Fred Hoyle during a debaate to
ridicule the theory.
If
the star Betelgeuse was the size of a 20-story
building, Earth would be the size of the period
at the end of this sentence.
The
first landing on an asteroid? On 2/14/01 NASA's Near-Earth-Asteroid-Rendezvous spacecraft
soft landed on Eros (more of a controlled ker-plunk).
Reduce stars
to grains of salt and the Milky Way would still
be 225 million miles wide and on average, stars
would be 60 feet apart.
Double
asteroids, Pulcova and Antiope,
are 188 million miles away. As a comparison, it
would be like New York and Boston in orbit around
each other.
Asteroid
2000 SG-344 is 180 feet wide and has a 1-500
chance of colliding with Earth in 2030 with an impact
of 100 World War II atom bombs.
The
number of inches in 1 mile equals the
number of astronomical units in 1 light year.
(One AU is the Earth-Sun distance and 93 million
miles).
A
day on Venus is 243 (Earth) days long.
A year on Venus is only 225 Earth days long. A Venus
day is longer than its year.
The universe weight in tons:
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Robert
A. Heinlein, "Once you make it to orbit,
you're half-way to anywhere."
Each
second the Sun becomes 4 million tons lighter.
One-fifth
of the universe is blocked from view by
the Milky Way.
Model
of the Andromeda Galaxy. Use 200 billion
grains of salt separated by 60 feet for its stars
and it would be as big as the Earth-Moon distance.
Murphy's
Law. The term comes from a scientist (Murphy)
who discovered that the sensors in a
rocket sled he was testing were installed backwards.
Richard
Nixon's name on the lunar lanaders
will be legible for 400,000 years.
This information
is gathered from "billions and billions" of sources
including:
"The Mind-Boggling
Universe" Neil McAleer, 1987, Doubleday &
Co.
"Don't
Know Much About the Universe?" Keneth Davis,
2001, HarperCollins.
NGC
5128 (Centaurus A)
This elliptical
galaxy is 17 million LY distant in the southern
constellation of Centaurus. SInce ellipticals don't
have dust lanes, those seen dissecting this galaxy
may be a small galaxy merging with a normal
spiral galaxy. This is also a radio galaxy with radio
lobes jutting out at right angles from the dark lane.
It also has a black hole at its center and is a strong
source of X-rays.
