Some Amazing Astronomical Facts
A teaspoon-full of Neutron star would weigh about 112 million tonnes.
Jupiter is heavier than all the other planets put together.
If you could put Saturn in an enormous bathtub, it would float. The planet is less dense than water.
Even on the clearest night, the human eye can only see about 3,000 stars. There are an estimated 100,000,000,000 in our galaxy alone!
If the sun were the size of a dot on an ordinary-sized letter 'i', then the nearest star would be 10 miles away.
Half-a-billionth of the energy released by the sun reaches the Earth
Temperatures on Venus are hot enough to melt lead.
If you could travel at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) it would take 100,000 years to cross our galaxy!
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 Earth, Mars and Jupiter!
On the equator you are about 3% lighter than at the poles, due to the centrifugal force of the Earth spinning.
The atmosphere on Earth is proportionately thinner than the skin on an apple.
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!
If a piece of the sun the size of a pinhead were to be placed on Earth, you could not safely stand within 90 miles of it!
Its estimated that the number of stars in the universe is greater than the number of grains of sand on all the beaches in the world! On a clear night, we can see the equivalent of a handful of sand.
Every year the sun evaporates 100,000 cubic miles of water from Earth (that weighs 400 trillion tonnes!)
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.
Astronomers believe that space is not a complete vacuum- there are three atoms per cubic metre.