The Final Frontier

  • If aliens on a planet 65 million light years away looked at Earth in detail, they would see dinosaurs.
  • An Australian National University study put the universe’s star count at about 70,000 million million million. And that’s just the ones we can see!
  • You can fit one billion grains of sand in an average bathtub, but… even with all our deserts and beaches, the sand grains number only gets to about 10 percent of that. 
    P.S.- There are more trees on the Earth (3 trillion) than there are stars in the Milky Way
  • About 10,000 light years away, the constellation of Aquila has a cloud of alcohol 1,000 times the diameter of our solar system. That’s enough space booze to make 400 trillion trillion pints of beer — or — two kegs, every 8 hours, for the next 30 billion years. 
  • There is enough carbon in the atmospheres of Saturn and Jupiter to create soot, which, when hit by lightning, hardens into graphite and falls downward. The pressure in their atmospheres is so great that the graphite hardens into diamonds. Storms on these planets may literally be raining diamonds as big as a centimeter across.  
  • Those big gray patches on our moon that make up the face of the “man” are actually long-dormant lava beds from a time when the moon was active and hot. 
  • So far, three moons have been found to have their own moons: Saturn’s moon Titan, Jupiter’s Io, and Neptune’s Triton.
  • Winter is always coming… on Uranus. Our planetary tilt (~23°) makes our seasons. Uranus’ seasonal tilt is 90° so summer and winter last 20 years. During those seasons, the 90° tilt means the planet “rolls” around the sun. 
  • If the Earth were the size of a grape, our sun would be a 4-foot beach ball resting 490 feet away. The Milky Way’s biggest star, Canis Majoris, would be nearly two miles in diameter.