I am an Astronomy amateur since I was a kid at school. It’s funny now when I remember how together with my best friend we were reading all the sci-fi books there were in our school’s library 🙂 Those stories kickstarted my interest into real science of Space. Later I got binoculars from my father, and then even a small telescope (Bresser!).
Then came my studying years and the career of an adult, and for a while, I forgot about my cosmic hobby… But now I’m back to it because in recent years I started to follow astronomy and space tech thanks to so many advances in space exploration (SpaceX, NASA), and news about cosmos becoming more mainstream in general (also thanks to social networks).
I think this is the best time to be a fan of astronomy, space travel, and all the cosmic wonders that are really just about to happen. So here’s my list of truly epic space facts!
Deep Cosmos Facts
I’m always wondering about the “real space travel” – will we ever get to other stars or reach speeds close to FTL?.. And here are some facts about space beyond our Solar system:
- It’s calculated that there are more galaxies in observable universe than there are stars in our Milky Way galaxy.
- The nearest star to us is Proxima Centauri, about 4.22 light-years away, and with our current rocket tech it is impossible to reach…
- Largest known star is “UY Scuti” and it is approximately 1,700 times larger than our Sun.
- Scientists now believe that the Universe is estimated to be almost 14 billion years old.
- The Milky Way galaxy is our home Galaxy and it has an estimated 100 billion stars and 100 trillion planets as our neighbors. Think about that number of planets!!!
- The temperature in space is around -454.81 Fahrenheit or about -270 Celsius.
- Today the largest known galaxy is “IC 1101“, and it is estimated to be around 6 million light years across. It’s like 60 times the size of our Galaxy!
- The fastest spacecraft launched from our planet is the Parker Solar Probe. Now it’s traveling at a speed of 213,200 mph or 343,000 kilometers per hour.
- Our first spacecraft that left Solar system is Voyager 1, and it did that just recently in 2012.
- Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, and no one knows will it continue to expand or stop at some point…
Thank you for being an astronomy fan & keep exploring and watching the night skies!
Also thanks to Jackson Hendry for that beautiful image of our Milky Way Galaxy in my main title image of this blog post.