Astronomy Facts

Only 55% of Americans know that the sun is a star.

Summer on Uranus lasts for 21 years.

The human brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons connected by approximately 100 trillion synaptic connections—far more connections than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

There are approximately 3,500 astronomers in the U.S. - but over 15,000 astrologers.

The earth is .02 degrees hotter during a full moon.

Saturn's rings stretch about 550,000 miles in circumference but are only 30 feet to half a mile thick—incredibly thin for their vast size.

The sun is 330,330 times larger than the earth.

Tidal forces between the Earth and Moon are slowing the Earth down and pushing the Moon further away.

In 1910, as Earth passed through the tail of Halley's Comet, people bought "Anti-Comet Pills", special "comet umbrellas", and gas masks, because there was public hysteria that all life on Earth would be destroyed by gas - called cyanogen - that was detected in the tail.

Jupiter emits powerful radio bursts that amateur astronomers can detect with a simple shortwave radio antenna, making it one of the few planets you can 'listen' to from Earth.

There is a mysterious and loud radio signal known as 'the space roar' that has yet to be explained.

Since 2017, astronomers have discovered dozens of potentially habitable exoplanets, bringing the total to over 60 worlds that might support life.

The ashes of the man who discovered Pluto are currently en route to dwarf planet, scheduled to arrive on the 14th of July, 2015.

According to a 2011 poll, 32% of Russians believe that the Sun orbits Earth.

Billions of neutrinos pass unnoticed through your body every second.

The center of the galaxy tastes like raspberries and smells like rum, according to astronomers.

An international team of astronomers has spotted the farthest known gravitational lens and, as Albert Einstein predicted, it is a galaxy that deflects and intensifies the light of a much further object.

The dwarf planet Ceres, located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, baffled scientists when NASA's Dawn spacecraft photographed mysterious bright spots on its surface in 2015. The gleaming patches sparked wild theories—from ice volcanoes to alien bases—before researchers discovered they were actually salt deposits left behind by briny water seeping up from an underground ocean.

Jupiter's magnetosphere is the largest single structure inside the Solar System. If you could see it with your eyes, it would appear larger than our full Moon.

Every other planet in the solar system can fit between Earth and the Moon — with roughly 4,400 km to spare.

In 1901, sponge divers exploring a 2,000-year-old shipwreck off Greece hauled up a corroded lump of bronze. Decades of scanning revealed what it was: a mechanical computer of around 30 interlocking gears that tracked the Sun, Moon and planets and predicted eclipses. Nothing this complex appears again for more than a thousand years.

Deep inside Neptune and Uranus, heat and pressure squeeze carbon from methane into diamonds that sink toward the core. In 2017, scientists at SLAC recreated the conditions and watched diamonds form.