Posted by Owen Jones in Uncategorized, tags: astronomy, children, education, entertainment, environment, galaxy, guide to, hobbies, how to, other, outdoors, planets, science, stars, Uncategorized
Astronomy is an interesting science to most people because it is stuffed with many fun astronomy facts. Everything from the size and temperature of our own star, the Sun, to the make-up of distant planets has been recorded. All of this information can be retold to entertain and enlighten your friends.
The Sun is a fantastic font for astronomy fun facts. Our own star, which provides us with all our heat and light is between 91 and 94.5 million miles from Earth. It’s not that nobody has measured the exact distance, but rather because the Earth revolves around the Sun in an ellipse, an uneven, orbit, so the distance varies depending on where the Earth lies in that orbit.
The Sun is only an average size star, yet it’s size is another terrific source of astronomy fun facts. As normal as it is, it accounts for about 98% of all the material in our solar system. Even with the huge planet of Jupiter on our side, we’re still a tiny 2% of non Sun material.
It would take the diameter of about 100 Earths to stretch across this average Sun. The solar winds created by the Sun reaches out about 50 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Or put another way, those solar winds reach out about 50 AU’s. An AU being the distance from the Earth to the Sun, which is quite an amazing fact, isn’t it?.
How about astronomy fun facts that don’t have much to do with the Sun? How about our Moon? It’s the only non-Earth object upon which man has walked so far. And one man actually travelled to the Moon but never left it. Dr. Eugene Shoemaker loved the Moon but was rejected as an astronaut. After his death he was cremated and his ashes were scattered over the moon by the Lunar Prospector spacecraft in 1999.
There are many more astronomy fun facts about the Moon. It’s the site of what may become the oldest footprint known to man. Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind left a print in the Moon dust that will likely still be there in 10 million years time.
Lots of people, in fact about 13% of those polled in 1988, still believed the Moon to be made of cheese. And finally, the suits worn by the Moon-walking astronauts weighed 180 pounds on Earth but only 30 pounds on the Moon, because of the Moon’s reduced gravity. Talk about losing weight quickly, eh?
Astronomy fun facts aren’t limited to our close astronomical neighbours. Looking at stars is like looking into the past. Some of the stars we see today in the night sky are so far away that their light takes a million years to get to us. Some of the stars you see may literally be images of stars a million years old that aren’t even there in the present. There are more than 1 x 10 ^22 stars in the universe. That’s a 1 followed by 22 zeros. The number is really quite staggering.
There are thousands of astronomy fun facts that we could go on about. But, unfortunately, this article can not be that long. So, please, walk out there at night, look upwards and learn more about astronomy for yourself.
Visit our new website on astronomy entitled Astronomy Today. Also published at .
Entries (RSS)