We’re all fascinated by the final frontier, and the allure of space rarely fails to inspire fascination in people. But there’s more to space than star gazing: there are facts about space out there, waiting for you and me to uncover them!
Ice Volcanoes
An ice volcano is an area on the surface of an ice cap that makes a sudden, explosive eruption, sending a column of ice and snow into the air. These are thought to occur when a thin layer of ice at the surface of an ice cap is suddenly melted away by the heating from below.
The centre of the Milky Way has a lot of black holes.
The centre of the Milky Way, as you probably know, is home to the Andromeda Galaxy, which is the closest galaxy to us. It’s also home to some black holes, which are so dense that even light cannot escape their gravity.
White holes exist
A white hole is an object that is so dense that it devours light. A black hole does the same, except it absorbs light instead of emitting it. According to a recent study from the University of Cambridge, a white hole is a theoretical object that will one day devour every photon in the universe.
Neptune has only completed one orbit around the sun since its discovery.
Neptune is the eighth planet in our solar system and the farthest from the sun. It takes approximately 165 years for the planet to complete one full orbit of our star. The planet is named after the Roman god of the sea.
There are 2 trillion galaxies in our universe.
For years, it was thought that the Milky Way galaxy was one of only around two trillion galaxies in the observable universe. Today, however, this number has been revised to around 2 trillion. The observable universe, as some scientists define it, is the part of the universe that we can detect with our senses, and the universe as a whole is the part of the universe that we can’t detect with our senses.
The sun takes up 99.8% of our galaxy’s mass.
The sun is the biggest object in our solar system: it contains 99.8% of the mass of our entire galaxy. However, it is estimated that only about 1% of the mass of the Milky Way is made up of the sun itself. This means that the other 99.2% must be made up of dark matter.
Earth’s rotation slows down as time goes by
One of the best-kept secrets of the universe is actually a well-known fact. This secret is that the Earth rotates around itself at a constant rate. This is known as the “rotational principle” and is one of the cornerstones of modern physics. Many studies have been conducted to try and discover why the rotational principle holds true, but no conclusive answers have been found.
Burning ice
A meteorologist-led research team at the University of Leeds has confirmed that water may have been found in the Moon’s regolith, the loose, rocky material that makes up the surface of the Moon. The finding has huge implications for the possibility of life on other planets, because water is one of the key requirements for life as we know it.
Raining glass
HD 189733b is known to make a lot of rock and ice, but in addition, they also rain glass. The glass falls from their atmospheres in the form of molten objects. These molten objects travel from the planet’s surface to the planet’s atmosphere around the planet and fall into a large space that includes the atmosphere and the atmosphere’s surface. These molten objects, when solidified, are called meteorites, which are used as samples for scientists to study the conditions of the planet.
There’s a planet made from diamonds. “Cancri e” is a star system that many experts believe is made from diamonds, since the star has been discovered to have a rocky core, a liquid ocean, and a diamond-like atmosphere. But how could diamonds be formed in a star system that is just 55 light years away? The short answer is that it is hard to say.
