Interesting facts about...space

Brogan

Legend
Staff Member
Quasars are so active and suck up so much matter they shine brighter than an entire galaxy of stars.

So far, 200,000 quasars have been identified. The closest is 780 million light years away and the farthest is 28 billion light years away.

The largest known quasar devours the matter equivalent of 600 Earths every minute :o

The brightest known quasars consume the mattar equivalent 1,000 Suns every year.

In 1 second a quasar can release enough energy to fuel the electrical energy needs of Earth for the next 1 billion years.

A black hole with the mass of the Sun will fit in a small town.

A black hole with the mass of the Earth will fit in the palm of your hand (not advisable).
 
Some more interesting stuff.....

In order for Einsteins theories to be correct space must be curved that is, if you fly an infinite distance away from earth you will end up coming back to where you started from. (trying getting your head around that!)

The Crew of Apollo 13 currently hold the record for the highest altitude ever attained by humans

The International Space Station has it's own post office to frank official mail

Ken Mattingly holds the record for the longest solo space flight when he spent just over 3 days 9 hours alone in orbit around the moon during the Apollo 16 mission.

When the Space Shuttle Columbia launched on the 21st of April 1981 it marked the first time that NASA had launched a rocket with a crew onboard without testing it on a space flight unmanned first.

When the Space Shuttle Columbia returned to Earth it marked the first time that an American crew had landed on dry land.

Yuri Gagarin never landed in his capsule, on re-entering the atmosphere he waited until he was at a reasonable height and then ejected and parachuted back to earth. The USSR kept this fact quiet for a number of years believing that it would make the first manned space flight invalid.

The first probe that NASA sent to fly past Mars was not equiped with a colour camera. Instead it sent back streams of data that were recieved on strips of paper at mission control. The strips were then cut up and asembled into a page and coloured in accordance with numbers printed on the strips much in the same way as a childs paint by numbers book.
 
and to quote Douglas Adams "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long walk down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

Sorry, couldn't resist LOL
 
Brogan said:
A black hole with the mass of the Earth will fit in the palm of your hand (not advisable).

That will be one of the mini black holes that the LHC might create! If it does create one, and it starts to consume the Earth and everything on it, I think it would be a reasonable response for me to say (in a voice like Neil off 'The Young Ones'), "Oh wowwww, that's really heavy man!"





Erm, shall I get me coat... :whistle:
 
I'm officially confused.

The video shows images with light travel time from earth of 13.7 billion years.

How did they get the images then?
It would have taken that long for the light to reach a telescope?

Or are they saying that's what it looked like 13.7 billion years ago, which is how long it has taken the light from that far away to reach Earth?

The sheer scale is just mind blowing...
 
Or are they saying that's what it looked like 13.7 billion years ago, which is how long it has taken the light from that far away to reach Earth?

In a nutshell, Yes.

When you look at the sun (ok don't do it directly or you will fry your eyeballs) you are seeing what the sun looked like just over nine minutes ago.

It's the same for the images you view through a telescope. Thanks to the lack of light and atmospheric polution the hubble space telescope has seen further back into the history of our universe than ever before. Radiation from the immediate aftermath of the big bang has been swimming around the universe for billions of years.
 
That's what I thought.

So in actual fact, the universe as it currently is looks nothing like that as everything has moved since.
 
Absolutely.

If the sun were to go bang we wouldn't know anything about it for 9 minutes, then earth

By looking at the light it is possible to tell if the target is moving away or moving closer to us by the shift in the spectrum towards the infra red or ultra violet ends. This Red or Blue shift, as it's known, has shown that as some galaxies are wizzing away from ours and some are wizzing closer to us.

It's mind warping stuff.
 
Brogan said:
I'm officially confused.

The video shows images with light travel time from earth of 13.7 billion years.

How did they get the images then?
It would have taken that long for the light to reach a telescope?

The sheer scale is just mind blowing...

Or sir could read the intro ;)

The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world's most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History.
 
Awrite, is it going to be something smart-arsey, along the lines of "Only-One!- Because-other-stars-aren't-called-The-Sun-And-So-Shouldn't-Be-Called-Solar-Anything"?...
 
Technically, any star with orbiting bodies is a solar system. Some people use the capitalized version to refer to our own.
 
There is only one Solar system because the Romans called our sun Sol and Solar means relating to Sol other systems are not Solar system because they do not relate to Sol, therefore any other planetary system would be named after it's parent star, for example if the star called Sargas was found to have planets orbiting it then it would be called the Sargas System and not the Solar System.

The ancient Greeks called the sun Helios and so it could be argued that we live in the Helios system.
 
Last edited:
Out of interest if another race of beings found us and knew what we called the sun then they would refer to us as Solarians just as we would call them Sargasians if they came from that system due to the fact that their is probably Billions of stars with planets that have life orbiting them and planet names would become meaningless on their own the planet name would be like the second or third line of the address if you took the constellation into consideration as well.

For instance a letter sent to me may well be addressed like this

Meph
Flat 4
254 Well Road.
Bristol
BS20 2UC
Great Britan
Gaia
Sol
The Milky Way

Or something like that, though **** knows how much the stamp would cost..

It is about time we stopped being so bloody colloquial where the universe is concerned
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom