Scary But True Space Facts That Will Rock Your World

Once upon a time, scientists noticed that something bizarre and inexplicable was causing chaos out there, in space. A mysterious celestial body was influencing the orbits of six smaller objects in the Kuiper Belt, far, far away from our home planet. This something got the name of Planet Nine, and a much more offensive nickname, Fatty. Well, no wonder, the thing was ten times heavier than Earth. But soon after astronomers started to research the hypothetical planet, things took an unexpected turn. Before I tell you all about this new development, let me summarize everything we know about Planet Nine. So as I've already mentioned, the thing is massive, more than ten times bigger than Earth and around 5,000 times as large as Pluto. That's why the planet might have had great gravitational force. It also means that Planet Nine is likely to be an ice giant. For a star, running into a black hole normally ends in a spectacular light show and its destruction. Just one star that astronomers know of managed to survive an encounter with a black hole as heavy as 400,000 suns. It happened in a galaxy about 250 million light-years away from Earth. Astronomers with really powerful equipment noticed bursts of X-rays that raged in space every nine hours. They thought they must be mayday signals from a star trapped by a cosmic abyss. The star was an average red giant when it met its new friend for the first time. When they got too close to each other, the hungry space monster couldn't resist the temptation and snacked on its guest. When it was done with the star's outer hydrogen layers, all that was left was the star's core. Eventually, the poor thing turned into a white dwarf. But for some reason, the giant space monster couldn't finish the meal and trapped it in its orbit for later instead. Ever since, the now-white dwarf has been traveling in nine-hour laps. It stays far enough from the hole so it won't fall in or get swallowed. Its journey isn't going super smoothly. Because of gravity, the orbital path is constantly rotating. After two days, it resembles a spirograph pattern. As the black hole keeps snacking on it, the star keeps losing its mass and growing in size. Its own orbit is becoming more and more circular. Scientists believe one day, it will be able to spiral away from its mean friend and turn into a planet the size of Jupiter in a trillion years. That's 70 times longer than the Universe has existed so far, so it might not ever happen. The Milky Way alone has hundreds of millions of black holes, and there are way more beyond it. They might feed on other stars and release them in other galaxies. The telescopes that exist now might not be strong enough to spot them. Most galaxies, including our Milky Way, have supermassive black holes at the center. They can be billions of times heavier than the Sun. Others of their kind are only three times the mass of the Sun. The nearest black hole to the Earth was spotted 1,000 light-years away, just around the corner in galactic terms. It's in a star system you can see with an unaided eye. Scientists found it when they noticed a star behaving weirdly. It was a giant, rotating like crazy. They guessed it must have a powerful gravitational companion. The hungriest black hole astronomers have spotted so far weighs as much as 34 billion suns and is about six times bigger than the one at the center of the Milky Way. It eats the equivalent of one sun every day. Sometimes, black holes even devour others of their kind that happen to be too close to them. Before you get on a spaceship to escape to some safe no-black-hole galaxy, here's some good news. Even though they're supermassive, they don't have a radius large enough to destroy Earth. And even the hungriest of them are safe to watch from a distance. No black hole should come closer to our planet than the Sun, for as long as the Universe has existed, multiplied by 10 billion times. In the unlikely case one of these scary things passes by Neptune, it could affect the Earth's orbit. That would be no good. In theory, anything can turn into a black hole. The only difference between it and the Sun is the material their centers are made of. It's incredibly dense in those huge space monsters. In reality, there's just one known way to make a black hole. It has to be the gravitational collapse of a supermassive star 20 to 30 times the mass of the Sun. So the Sun will never ever become a black hole. Trash isn't just a problem in Earth's oceans, cities, and forests. There is a thing called space junk, which is any human-made object that's been left in space and now serves no purpose. There's also natural debris from meteoroids and other cosmic objects. There are currently over 500,000 pieces of space debris orbiting the Earth at speeds high enough to cause significant damage if they were to collide with a spacecraft or satellite. NASA does its best to track every single object to ensure that missions outside Earth can reach their destination safely. Have you ever looked up at the night sky and tried to count all the stars? Yeah, good luck! Our galaxy, the Milky Way, not the candy bar, the galaxy, has about 100 billion stars. But other estimates put it at over 200 billion, since calculating the exact amount is an almost impossible task even for astronomers. As for the entire Universe, there are at least a billion trillion stars. That's a one with 21 zeros after it. For comparison, that means there are more stars in space than there are grains of sand on all of Earth's beaches. When the planets in the Solar System were just starting to form, Earth didn't have a moon for the longest time. It took 100 million years for our natural satellite to appear. There are several theories as to how the moon came into existence, but the prevailing one is the fission theory. Is that where somebody went fishing, caught the moon on a hook, and dragged it over into Earth's orbit? No, I made that up. The fission theory proposes that the moon was formed when an object collided with Earth, sending particles flying about. Gravity pulled the particles together, and the moon was created. It eventually settled down onto Earth's elliptical plane, which is the path that the moon orbits. A trip to the nearest star apart from the Sun would take you 5 million years on a commercial airplane. That's what I call a long-haul flight. It would take you about 100,000 years to travel from one end of our Milky Way galaxy to the other at the speed of light. On a plane, that's just too many zeros to fit into a single screen. The Sun can fit about a million Earths inside it. But there's a star called UY Scuti that's about 1,700 times larger than the Sun. Almost everything in space is connected with everything else by gravity. Star systems are part of galaxies, galaxies are part of clusters, and clusters are parts of superclusters. The largest known supercluster in the Universe is the Hercules-Corona-Borealis Great Wall. That's a name. It's more than 10 billion light-years wide. Mars has the largest natural formations in the Solar System. The mountain 3 times taller than Everest, the canyon almost 7 times longer than the Grand Canyon, and the crater that could fit half the Amazon River across it. Although the Big Bang theory is the most viable one, researchers still find evidence against it. For example, one theory suggests there's an axis around which the whole Universe rotates. It's aptly named the axis of evil. There's a supermassive black hole at the center of almost every major galaxy, including ours. Black holes can attract not only stars and planets, but also other black holes, eventually merging and becoming one with a much greater mass. The spinning movement and enormous gravity of black holes sometimes makes it throw jets of matter into space, traveling at almost the speed of light. There's a thing called the Great Attractor. It's a gravitational anomaly outside our galaxy that can't be seen but is known to attract the Milky Way and lots of other galaxies toward itself. The highest mountain in the Solar System is Olympus Mons on Mars. It's 3 times as high as Mount Everest, the Earth's highest mountain above sea level. If you were standing on top of Olympus Mons, you wouldn't understand you were standing on a mountain. Its slopes would be hidden by the planet's curvature. The Moon's gravity is only 17% of the Earth's. If your weight was 100 pounds on our home planet, you'd only weigh 17 pounds on the Moon. You would be able to walk a distance 6 times longer and carry a weight 6 times heavier there. Or just hire somebody from NASA to carry it for you. Though it's easier to walk on the Moon, it's more dangerous too. An astronaut's foot in a heavy spacesuit sinks into the Moon's ground up to 6 inches deep. Long-distance jumps are uncontrolled and dangerous because the Moon's surface is full of deep craters. One of the things Jupiter's famous for is the Great Red Spot, a giant spinning storm. This phenomenon used to be so gigantic that it could fit 2 or even 3 Earths. But the spot is shrinking. Right now, it wouldn't fit more than one Earth. If two pieces of the same kind of metal touch in space, they bond and get permanently stuck together. It doesn't happen on Earth thanks to water and air that keep pieces separate. The Moon is not an ideal sphere. It's shaped more like an egg because of the Earth's gravity. The base of the egg shape points toward our planet. Normal visible matter, for example, planets and stars, make up just 5% of the Universe. The rest consists of invisible dark energy, that's 68%, and dark matter, about 27%. It leaves us with 95% of space we know nothing about. The mysterious Kuiper Belt lies behind the orbit of Neptune. It's filled with massive icy objects. The most curious thing about this phenomenon is its movement pattern. The only explanation astronomers have, Neptune is hiding a ginormous planet. This hypothetical planet has already got the name Planet 9. All we have to do is wait until its existence is confirmed. Or not. You won't be able to wear a hat on Venus, ever. And just try to stand on your feet. The planet is insanely windy. Its upper winds blow 50 times faster than the planet rotates. What's more, these fierce winds never stop and can get even stronger with time. Wanna get away? You'll have to travel 11 billion miles away from Earth before ever leaving the Solar System. Take your Google Maps with you. You probably heard of methane gas, a byproduct of natural processes such as volcanic activity and cows. Anyway, this gas is not only a part of the Martian atmosphere, but also the thing that confuses astronomers to no end. The thing is that the volume of methane on Mars keeps wavering, and scientists just can't figure out where it might be coming from. Can there be cows on Mars? As you may remember, Pluto used to be a planet, but was stripped of this title in 2006. Later, it was reclassified as a dwarf planet. Gee, make up your mind! But the most unexpected fact about this celestial body is that its diameter is smaller than that of the US. See for yourself, the greatest distance across the country from Maine to Northern California is about 2,800 miles. As for Pluto, it's only 1,473 miles across. In fact, if you laid Pluto right down in the middle of the United States, you'd crush the heck out of Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska. Bad idea. The planet Uranus, or Uranus, you can't win either way, rotates on its side, and astronomers have no idea why the planet has chosen such an unusual position. The culprits could be ancient mega-powerful collisions, but so far it's just a theory. By the way, this is the only planet laying on its side. Our Sun is insanely massive. Want some proof? Well, 99.86% of all the mass in the Solar System is in the mass of the Sun, in particular the hydrogen and helium it's made of. The remaining 0.14% is mostly the mass of the Solar System's 8 planets. A light-year is the unit of distance covered by light in a single year. Light moves a little more than 186,000 miles per second, so one light-year is almost 6 trillion miles. Which reminds me, our Milky Way is 105,700 light-years wide. Really, trust me. There's a whole lot of water floating in space. Astronomers discovered a huge vapor cloud that's 140 trillion times the mass of the Earth's ocean water. But don't worry, it's 12 billion light-years away, so we won't drown in that stuff anytime soon. Saturn's rings weren't discovered all at once. It happened gradually, and they were named alphabetically based on the time scientists found them. They go like this, D-C-B-A-F-G-E, which, of course, spells Dik-Baf-Gi. There's a giant red spot on Jupiter that's bigger than Earth. Astronomers confirm that it's a perpetual storm that has been going on for centuries. Color me weightless. Astronauts only wear orange spacesuits during launch, landing, or when they're in the spaceship for survival and rescue purposes. Their white suits are equipped differently to help them survive in outer space. The closest neighbor to our Milky Way is the Andromeda Galaxy. It's 2.5 million light-years away, and you can see it on a clear night with an unaided eye. And, by the way, in a little more than 4 billion years, our galaxy will collide with the Andromeda Galaxy. According to some predictions, the galaxies won't survive, but our solar system will. Place your bets! It takes 243 Earth days for Venus to complete a rotation around its axis. But it takes 225 Earth days for the planet to orbit the Sun. That means a day on Venus is longer than a year. We always see the same side of the Moon no matter where we are on Earth. That's because the Moon rotates around the Earth at the same speed it rotates around its own axis. Outer space isn't a perfect vacuum. It contains not only stars and planets, but also clouds of interstellar dust, space plasma, and cosmic rays. Those are atom fragments dashing from the outskirts of the solar system. One phenomenon people should be worried about while exploring space is cold welding. If two pieces of the same kind of metal touch in space, they bond and get permanently stuck together. It doesn't happen on Earth since water and air keep pieces separate. Astronauts on board the International Space Station don't use their feet to walk. They float around. So in orbit, the skin on their feet becomes very soft and starts to peel off. That's why they have to take their socks off very carefully. Otherwise, skin cells will break free and float around in the almost weightless environment. Earthquakes on the Moon, or more correctly, moonquakes, aren't something from science fiction. They don't occur as often as on our planet. And when they do, it happens closer to the center of the satellite. Scientists think moonquakes might be caused by the gravity of Earth and the Sun. One of the moons of Saturn, Rhea, might have a ring system consisting of three narrow bands. If astronomers manage to confirm it, it'll be the first time people discovered rings around a moon. Hey, that's nothing. I've had rings around my collar for years. Normal visible matter, for example, planets and stars, makes up just 5% of the Universe. The rest consists of invisible dark energy, that's 68%, and dark matter, about 27%. Add it up, and there's 95% of space we know nothing about. In its darkest areas, space is freezing cold, minus 454 degrees Fahrenheit. But try orbiting Earth in the sunlight, and you'll understand how scorching 250 degrees feel. That's one of the reasons astronaut spacesuits are white. This color is the best to reflect the heat from the Sun.