Astronomy Trivia

One Liner Astronomy

01. Lightning is about 5 times hotter than our Sun.
02. The Sun is around 4.6 billion years old.
03. The energy produced by the Sun is 383 billion trillion kilowatts.
04. The closest star to our solar system is called Proxima Centauri and it's over 4.26 light years away.
05. The light of the Sun takes 8 minutes to reach Earth.
06. There are stars that are over 600,000 times as bright as the Sun.
07. Sunspots are areas on the surface of the Sun that are 300 degrees cooler than other areas.
08. The only star in the sky that apparently doesn't appear to move from night
to night is called Polaris, the North Star or north celestial pole.
09. Did you know that when you look up into the night sky, the light you see
from a star today could be the light shown from a star over thousands of
years ago?
10. When you look at the Andromeda galaxy (which is 2.3 million light years
away), the light you are seeing took 2.3 million years to reach you. Thus you
are seeing the galaxy as it was 2.3 million years ago. This is farthest naked
eye object.
11. The Earth is not a sphere! It actually is an oblate spheroid, it is squashed
slightly at the poles and bulges out at the equator due to its rotation.
12. When Galileo viewed Saturn for the first time through a telescope, he described the planet as having "ears". It was not until 1655 that Christian Huygens suggested the crazy theory that they might be an enormous set of rings around the planet.
13. If you could put Saturn in an enormous bathtub, it would float. The planet is less dense than water.
14. A teaspoon-full of Neutron star would weigh about 112 million tonnes.
15. Jupiter is heavier than all the other planets put together.
16. Even on the clearest night, the human eye can only see about 3,000 stars.
17. Venus is the only planet where the sun rises from the west.
18. There are an estimated 150,000,000,000 in our galaxy alone!
19. The tallest mountain in the solar system is Olympus Mons, on Mars at a height of about 25 kms, nearly three times the height of Mount Everest.
20. If the sun were the size of a dot on an ordinary-sized letter 'i', then the nearest star would be 16 kms away.
21. Half-a-billionth of the energy released by the sun reaches the Earth
22. Temperatures on Venus are hot enough to melt lead.
23. If you could travel at the speed of light (2,99,600 kmps per second) it would take 100,000 years to cross our galaxy!
24. Only one side of the moon ever faces Earth. The moons period of rotation is exactly the same as it's period of revolution.
25. Betelgeuse, the bright star on Orion's top-left shoulder, is so big that if it was placed where the sun is, it would swallow up Mars.
26. If you stand on the equator, you are spinning at about 1,600 kmph in as the Earth turns, as well as charging along at 29.5 kmps round the sun.
27. On the equator you are about 3% lighter than at the poles, due to the centrifugal force of the Earth spinning.
28. The atmosphere on Earth is proportionately thinner than the skin on an apple.
29. On Mercury a day (the time it takes for it to spin round once) is 59 Earth-days. Its year (the time it takes to orbit the sun) is 88 days- that means there are fewer than 2 days in a year!
30. If a piece of the sun the size of a pinhead were to be placed on Earth, you could not safely stand within 150 kms of it!
31. Jupiter acts as a huge vacuum cleaner, attracting and absorbing comets and meteors. Some estimates say that without Jupiters gravitational influence the number of massive projectiles hitting Earth would be 10,000 times greater.
32. Saturn is not the only planet with rings- Jupiter, Uranus & Neptune have it's own ring system, too.
33. As late as 1820, the universe was thought by European scientists to be 60,000 years old. It is now thought to be about 13,700,000,000 years old.
34. The Earth is rotating on its axis at a rate of 460 metres per second at the equator, and is orbiting the sun at a rate of about 30 kilometres per second.
35. The sun is orbiting the centre of the Milky Way at a rate of about 220 kilometres per second.
36. The matter in the universe is so thinly dispersed that the universe can be compared with a building twenty miles long, twenty miles wide, and twenty miles high, containing only a single grain of sand.
37. Most of the elements found in the human body originated in stars; we are literally made of stardust.
38. Saturn's beautiful rings are not solid. They are made up of particles of ice, dust and rock -- some as tiny as grains of sand, some much larger than skyscrapers.
39. To communicate with distant spacecraft, NASA's Deep Space Network uses antenna with a diameter of up to 70 meters (230 feet). That is almost as big as a football field.
40. Sun rises from exact East direction only twice a year.
41. Did you know that every day the Hubble Space Telescope archives 3 to 5 gigabytes of data?
42. Did you know that 382 kg of rocks were brought back from the moon during the Apollo missions?
43. If you could see as well as the Wide Field and Planetary Camera on the Hubble Space Telescope, you would be able to read the fine print on a newspaper 1.5 km away!
44. The Sun is the largest object in the solar system, and constitutes over 98.9 percent of the solar system’s mass.
45. Factually "Saptarishi" is not full constellation but, it is part of "Ursa Major" consteallation comprise of 20 naked eye visible stars making "Great Bear" imagination in the sky.