250 Fun Facts
250 Interesting Facts: Animals, Human Body, Space, Food & History
Space Facts
A day on Venus is longer than its year. Venus takes about 243 Earth days to spin once, but only 225 Earth days to orbit the Sun.
Venus spins in the opposite direction to most planets, so on Venus the Sun would rise in the west.
Venus is the hottest planet in our solar system, with surface temperatures of around 465°C, even though Mercury is closer to the Sun.
Sunlight takes about 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach Earth. When you see the Sun, you're seeing it as it was a few minutes ago.
The footprints left on the Moon by astronauts could last for millions of years, because there's no wind or rain to wash them away.
Olympus Mons on Mars is the tallest volcano in the solar system, roughly two and a half times the height of Mount Everest.
Jupiter's Great Red Spot is a giant storm that is bigger than the entire Earth and has been raging for centuries.
Saturn is less dense than water. If you could find a bathtub big enough, Saturn would float.
A single teaspoon of material from a neutron star would weigh around a billion tonnes on Earth.
The Sun makes up about 99.8% of the solar system's mass
Everything else, including all the planets, moons, asteroids and comets, adds up to just 0.2%. The Sun is so large that around 1.3 million Earths could fit inside it.
Scientists estimate there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all of Earth's beaches.
Space is completely silent. There's no air to carry sound waves, so even huge explosions make no noise.
Astronauts can grow up to about 3% taller in space because their spines stretch without the pull of gravity. They shrink back after returning to Earth.
The International Space Station circles Earth about every 90 minutes, so astronauts see around 16 sunrises and sunsets every day.
Mars looks red because its surface is covered in iron oxide dust, which is basically rust.
Sunsets on Mars look blue, the opposite of sunsets on Earth.
Uranus spins on its side, with its axis tilted at about 98 degrees, possibly because of an ancient collision.
Neptune has the strongest winds in the solar system, reaching speeds of over 2,000 km/h.
Pluto was reclassified from a planet to a dwarf planet in 2006.
Halley's Comet visits only once every 76 years
Halley's Comet is one of the few comets you can see without a telescope. It was last visible from Earth in 1986 and will return in 2061, so many people get just one chance in their lifetime to see it.
The Moon is slowly drifting away from Earth, by about 3.8 centimetres every year.
We always see the same side of the Moon, because it spins exactly once each time it orbits Earth.
Earth isn't a perfect sphere. It bulges slightly around the equator because of its spin.
A year on Mercury lasts just 88 Earth days.
Jupiter has the shortest day of any planet, spinning once in about 10 hours.
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is about 100,000 light-years across.
When you look at the stars, you're seeing light that left them years, centuries or even thousands of years ago.
The Sun is actually white. It looks yellow to us because of the way Earth's atmosphere scatters its light.
Total solar eclipses are possible because of a lucky coincidence: the Sun is about 400 times wider than the Moon, but also about 400 times farther away.
Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object
Launched in 1977, the Voyager 1 spacecraft entered interstellar space in 2012, becoming the first human-made object to leave the Sun's protective bubble. It carries a Golden Record with sounds and images from Earth, in case it is ever found by intelligent life.
Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space on 12 April 1961.
Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space in 1963.
Only 12 people have ever walked on the Moon, starting with Neil Armstrong in 1969.
On 23 August 2023, India's Chandrayaan-3 became the first mission to land near the Moon's south pole. India now celebrates 23 August as National Space Day.
In 2014, India's Mangalyaan reached Mars orbit on its very first attempt, making India the first Asian nation to reach Mars.
Astronauts' sense of taste often dulls in space, so many of them prefer spicy food on missions.
Earth's spin is slowly getting slower. When dinosaurs were alive, a day lasted only about 23 hours.
Mercury has almost no atmosphere, so its temperature swings from over 400°C in the day to below -170°C at night.
A comet's tail always points away from the Sun, no matter which direction the comet is travelling.
The first photo of a black hole was taken in 2019
Black holes have gravity so strong that not even light can escape them, which makes them invisible. In 2019, scientists linked telescopes around the world to capture the first image of one, showing a glowing ring of hot gas around the black hole at the centre of a galaxy called M87.
Scientists believe it may rain diamonds deep inside Neptune and Uranus, where extreme pressure turns carbon into diamond.
Earth is the only planet in our solar system that isn't named after a god or goddess.
Saturn's rings are made mostly of ice and are surprisingly thin, often less than a kilometre thick.
The Moon has earthquakes too. They're called moonquakes.
A light-year is a distance, not a time. It's about 9.46 trillion kilometres, the distance light travels in a year.
The closest star to Earth after the Sun is Proxima Centauri, about 4.2 light-years away.
Space is usually said to begin at the Kármán line, about 100 kilometres above Earth's surface.
In space, a candle flame burns in a round ball instead of a teardrop shape.
The International Space Station is about the size of a football field and is the largest human-made object in space.
The universe is about 13.8 billion years old
Scientists have worked out the age of the universe by studying the oldest light in the cosmos, left over from shortly after the Big Bang. The part of the universe we can observe is about 93 billion light-years across, and it is still expanding today.
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