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Space Facts
977 facts in Space. Click any fact to see its full page.
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Venus has over 1,600 major volcanoes, more than any other planet in the solar system.
The tallest cliff in the solar system is Verona Rupes on Uranus's moon Miranda, standing about 12 miles high.
A quasar can emit more energy than an entire galaxy containing billions of stars.
Mercury has ice at its poles despite surface temperatures reaching 800 degrees Fahrenheit, because deep craters never see sunlight.
The James Webb Space Telescope can detect the heat signature of a bumblebee on the Moon.
Some black holes spin at nearly the speed of light, warping space-time around them.
Pluto has a heart-shaped nitrogen ice glacier on its surface called Tombaugh Regio.
The Karman line, at 62 miles above sea level, is the internationally recognized boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space.
There is a supermassive black hole at the center of nearly every large galaxy, including the Milky Way.
The Sun makes up about 99.86% of the total mass of the entire solar system.
The average density of Saturn is less than that of water — about 0.69 grams per cubic centimeter.
Astronauts report that space smells like seared steak, gunpowder, and raspberries due to dying stars releasing ethyl formate.
The Voyager Golden Record contains sounds and images from Earth, intended as a message for any extraterrestrial civilization that might find it.
Saturn's moon Mimas looks almost identical to the Death Star from Star Wars due to a massive impact crater.
The Fermi Paradox asks why, given the high probability of extraterrestrial civilizations, we have not yet detected any signs of intelligent life.
The aurora borealis and aurora australis occur simultaneously at both poles of the Earth.
The Northern Lights are caused by charged particles from the Sun interacting with gases in the Earth's atmosphere.
Astronauts cannot cry in space because tears do not fall — they form floating blobs around the eyes.
Neutron stars are so dense that a matchbox-sized chunk would weigh about 3 billion tons.
The Earth's magnetic field flips every few hundred thousand years, swapping magnetic north and south.
The Wow! signal, detected in 1977, remains one of the strongest candidates for an extraterrestrial radio signal ever recorded.
Mercury has no atmosphere to retain heat, so temperatures swing from 800 degrees Fahrenheit during the day to minus 290 at night.
There are estimated to be 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe.
The Moon is moving away from Earth at a rate of about 1.5 inches per year.
The Cassini spacecraft orbited Saturn for 13 years before intentionally diving into the planet's atmosphere in 2017.
Solar flares can disrupt satellite communications, GPS signals, and power grids on Earth.
The Andromeda Galaxy is the nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way and contains roughly one trillion stars.
A white dwarf star is so dense that a teaspoon of its material would weigh about 15 tons on Earth.
The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter contains millions of asteroids but is mostly empty space.
The Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula are columns of interstellar gas and dust about 5 light-years tall.
Venus rotates so slowly that a single day on Venus is longer than its entire year.
The largest known galaxy, IC 1101, has a diameter of about 6 million light-years.
Astronauts on the ISS witness about 16 sunrises and sunsets every day.
The first photograph of a black hole was captured in 2019 by the Event Horizon Telescope.
A magnetar is a type of neutron star with a magnetic field so powerful it could erase a credit card from halfway across the solar system.
The surface temperature of the Sun is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, but its corona reaches over 2 million degrees.
Europa, a moon of Jupiter, likely has a saltwater ocean beneath its icy surface that may contain more water than all of Earth's oceans.
The Oort Cloud, a theoretical shell of icy objects surrounding the solar system, may extend up to 2 light-years from the Sun.
Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars that emit beams of radiation like cosmic lighthouses.
Triton, Neptune's largest moon, orbits in the opposite direction of the planet's rotation, suggesting it was captured from the Kuiper Belt.
The Crab Nebula is the remnant of a supernova explosion that was visible from Earth in 1054 AD.
There is a massive cloud of water vapor in space that contains 140 trillion times the amount of water in Earth's oceans.
The Sun will eventually become a red giant and engulf Mercury, Venus, and possibly Earth in about 5 billion years.
The Kuiper Belt, a region beyond Neptune, contains billions of icy objects including dwarf planets.
The space between stars is not completely empty — it contains about one atom per cubic centimeter on average.
Titan, Saturn's largest moon, has lakes and rivers made of liquid methane and ethane instead of water.
The cosmic microwave background radiation is the afterglow of the Big Bang and can be detected in every direction in space.
Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter, is the largest moon in the solar system and is even bigger than the planet Mercury.
The closest star to our solar system, Proxima Centauri, is about 4.24 light-years away.
Pluto's largest moon, Charon, is so big relative to Pluto that the two orbit each other like a double planet system.