10 Facts About SPACE

A black hole is any collapsed star of a size 10-15 as our sun. In a black hole all of the matter from the star has become compacted to zero volume to create a single point of infinite density. They are black, because anything within a certain radius (the event horizon) would need to be traveling at the speed of light to escape. Thus light cannot escape making them completely invisible from outside.

The corona is the halo we see around the sun in an eclipse. Actually though it’s always there and is the sun’s ‘plasma atmosphere’ which expands millions of kilometers into space. What’s fascinating about it is the fact that it is hotter than the sun over a million degrees or 106 Kelvin. There is no way that thermal energy could be transferred and increased from the surface of the sun to the corona however, so its heat source remains not fully understood.

Cold welding is exactly what it sounds like and demonstrates a unique way to meld metal and one of the most amazing of the space facts. Essentially, should any two metal objects touch while in the cold vacuum of space, they would immediately become permanently bonded together, provided those have no coating.

When we look at the stars, we are actually looking ‘back in time’. This is because of the time it takes for light to reach us – even the light coming from the sun took 30 thousand years to reach us from its core. The stars we see at night are of course even further away and sometimes the light is millions of years old. In some cases the stars have long since died but we still see their light.

It was assumed until recently that the speed at which the universe is expanding would be slowing down as gravity began to take hold again. However interestingly the exact opposite in fact appears to be true – the universe is still getting bigger. The other question of course is where is it expanding into?

This fact gives interesting support to the concept of the big bang – that being the fact that the universe is giving off radio waves or ‘interference’ which is thought to have been caused by the big bang. This is known as the ‘afterglow’ of creation.

Scientists recently discovered that the universe is expanding and that all the elements in space are moving further away from each other as a result (imagine dots drawn on a balloon being blown up). This is often seen as evidence for the big bang theory of creation.

The moon is a satellite – a chunk of rock that orbits the Earth and follows an elliptical orbit around the sun along with us. Interestingly there are several asteroids (at least three) that follow this pattern. The first to be discovered was the 5km Cruithne.

This fact is directly related to the fact that the moon is drifting away. As a result, the Earth spins at 0.002 seconds per day slower every century. That then means that our days are actually getting gradually longer.

Every year the moon moves 3.8cm away from the Earth – which when you think about it is actually a fairly large amount.