Fun facts about space

All fun facts about space

• A day on Venus (243 Earth days) is longer than a year on Venus (225 Earth days).Source: NASA
• Saturn is less dense than water. In a big enough bathtub, it would float.Source: NASA
• Footprints left on the Moon could last millions of years, because there is no wind to blow them away.Source: NASA
• Sunlight takes about 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach Earth.Source: NASA
• About 1.3 million Earths would fit inside the Sun.Source: NASA
• Jupiter's Great Red Spot is a storm wider than Earth that has raged for hundreds of years.Source: NASA
• Space is silent. Sound needs air or another material to travel through.Source: NASA
• Olympus Mons on Mars is about 22 km high, two and a half times the height of Mount Everest.Source: NASA
• The International Space Station circles Earth about every 90 minutes, so astronauts see around 16 sunrises a day.Source: NASA
• Uranus spins on its side, probably knocked over by a giant collision long ago.Source: NASA
• The Moon drifts about 3.8 cm (1.5 in) further from Earth every year.Source: NASA, lunar laser ranging
• Astronauts grow up to about 5 cm (2 in) taller in space, because their spines stretch without gravity.Source: NASA
• A year on Mercury lasts just 88 Earth days.Source: NASA
• Venus is the hottest planet, even though Mercury is closer to the Sun. Its thick clouds trap the heat.Source: NASA
• Pluto is narrower than the United States is wide.Source: NASA (Pluto is about 2,380 km across)
• A teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh around a billion tonnes on Earth.Source: NASA
• Mars has blue sunsets.Source: NASA, Curiosity rover images
• There is a planet-sized cloud of water vapour around a black hole 12 billion light years away, with 140 trillion times the water in Earth's oceans.Source: NASA / Caltech, 2011
• The Sun makes up about 99.8% of all the mass in our solar system.Source: NASA