Space & Astronomy

There are 8 planets in our solar system. Pluto was reclassified as a 'dwarf planet' by the International Astronomical Union in 2006.

Neil Armstrong took humanity's first steps on the Moon on July 20, 1969, during the Apollo 11 mission, famously saying 'That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.'

A light year is the distance that light travels in one year — about 5.88 trillion miles. It's used to measure the vast distances between stars and galaxies.

Jupiter is so massive that more than 1,300 Earths could fit inside it. Its Great Red Spot is a storm that has been raging for at least 350 years.

The Sun is about 73% hydrogen and 25% helium. It converts roughly 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second through nuclear fusion.

The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy containing an estimated 100 to 400 billion stars. Our solar system is located on one of its spiral arms.

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched on April 24, 1990, aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. It has captured some of the most iconic images of deep space ever seen.

The ISS typically houses a crew of 6 astronauts. It orbits Earth about every 90 minutes at an altitude of roughly 250 miles, meaning the crew sees 16 sunrises per day.

At the center of a black hole lies a singularity, a point of theoretically infinite density. Not even light can escape a black hole's gravitational pull.

Perseverance landed on Mars in February 2021 to search for signs of ancient microbial life. It also carried Ingenuity, the first helicopter to fly on another planet.

The International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto in 2006 because it hasn't 'cleared the neighborhood' around its orbit — one of the three criteria for full planet status.

The Alpha Centauri system is about 4.37 light years away. Specifically, Proxima Centauri, a small red dwarf in the system, is the closest at 4.24 light years.

The asteroid belt sits between Mars and Jupiter. It contains millions of rocky objects, though the total mass is less than 4% of Earth's Moon.

Saturn's rings are mostly composed of ice particles and rocky debris ranging from tiny grains to chunks as large as houses. The rings span up to 282,000 km wide but are remarkably thin.

The Big Bang theory states that the universe began as a singularity approximately 13.8 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since. It remains the leading scientific explanation for the origin of the universe.