From time immemorial, people have peered into the dark night sky, bright grains of stars flickering on its huge canvas, they were surprised by bizarre spots on a silver moon disk ...
Many scientists, from ancient times, trying to embrace all this boundless splendor with their own imperfect intelligence, made numerous assumptions, put forward the most intricate hypotheses - and what is there?
How is our universe arranged? Why do stars shine differently? Why does the moon change phases? Does anyone live there? And on other planets? ..
In the XX century, mankind finally overcame Earth's gravity and was able to see cosmic expanses in all their grandeur, not from the surface of their home planet, but directly “from the place of the main events”.
Modern telescopes allow us to look into neighboring galaxies, but, alas, we still do not really know what is happening on the outskirts of the solar system.
Boundless, great and mysterious, the cosmos is so huge that we cannot fully grasp its scope. Nevertheless, over the past century, earth scientists have learned a lot of interesting facts about our Universe.
Here are just 10 of them:
10. Around the Earth rotates a dump of space debris
The first artificial Earth satellite (Sputnik-1 Soviet spacecraft) was launched into orbit on October 4, 1957, that is, only 61 years ago.
But during this time, mankind, alas, managed to very “rubbish” around our blue planet. According to various sources, today from 350 to 500 thousand objects weighing from a couple of grams to 15 tons fly in terrestrial orbit at a tremendous speed: here are the “remains” of spent satellites, which have not had time to completely burn down the spacecraft stages in the atmosphere, and lost during space missions of the past, details and objects, etc.
They often collide with each other, scattering into thousands of even smaller parts. And each of these objects is capable (with a particularly “successful” hit) of damaging either the astronaut's spacesuit, or even an entire space station, given their speed (9834 m / s) and inertia.
And now leading cosmologists are struggling with the problem of how to collect (or destroy on the spot) all this space dump.
9. Martian volcano Olympus - the highest peak in the solar system
The highest peak on planet Earth is, as everyone knows, Mount Everest (or Chomolungma) - 8848 m. Impressive? And by the standards of space - absolutely not.
The highest peak of the solar system is on Mars, it is the extinct volcano Olympus, which is almost 3 times higher than Everest. Its height is 26.5-27 km, and the diameter at the base is about 540 km. This is truly a royal (or rather, divine) size!
8. There are no sounds in space
Many of us like to watch large-scale and colorful fantasy action films with interstellar battles, where huge space cruisers explode very beautifully with great noise. So, - this is, to put it mildly, a lie.
Firstly, in outer space there will not be a large-scale explosion with a cloud of flame - oxygen actually is needed for a flame. And where does he come from in a cosmic vacuum?
If only from the bowels of the ship itself. But then it will not be a huge and terrible “BANG!”, But a quick and soft “Fuckhh ...” And you, alas, will not hear the roar, because for the propagation of sound waves you need at least some kind of medium (air, water, etc.) .d.), and in space we have, again, only a vacuum.
7. On Venus, a day lasts longer than a year
Venus is perhaps the strangest planet in the solar system. Firstly, it is the only one among all the planets that rotates counterclockwise. Why? And no one will tell you for sure: scientists are still arguing about the causes of this phenomenon.
Secondly, it is the hottest planet - the temperature on its surface reaches 462º C. By the way, here the atmospheric pressure is 92 times higher than the Earth's. Somehow, not very Venus lives up to her name, - the goddess of love turns out to be creepy from her.
Well, and another big oddity: this planet rotates around the Sun faster than it turns around its own axis. As a result, it turns out that a day on Venus lasts 243 Earth days (wow! More than 7 Earth months!), And a year - only 225 Earth days. Day is longer than a year! How do you like that?
6. Saturn does not sink
The huge Saturn, whose equatorial diameter is 9.5 times larger than the earth, is nevertheless a relatively “light” planet, since its density is the smallest in the Solar System: only 0.687 g / cm3, it is less than the density of water. (By the way, the most "dense" planet is our native Earth).
The fact is that Saturn does not have a solid surface at all: it consists of 96% hydrogen, 3% helium, and the remaining 1% methane, ammonia and other gases.
Therefore, if somewhere in the Universe there was a huge tank of water (a little more than 120 thousand kilometers in diameter - that's all!), Then Saturn would not have drowned in it, but would have sailed through the water like a balloon. Yeah ... It would be an incredible sight!
5. 99.86% of the mass of the solar system is the mass of the sun
When you see the solar system in the picture, you can hardly imagine the true size of the planets. Of course, they are usually drawn on an approximate scale: Mercury is the smallest, Jupiter is the largest, somewhere there, from the edge, you can see the side of the huge Sun ...
But here are specific impressive figures: the mass of Jupiter is 2.5 times greater than that of all the other (combined) planets; Jupiter can accommodate 1000 planets the size of the Earth; and the Sun is 300 thousand (!) times larger than the Earth, and its mass is 99.86% of the total mass of the entire Solar System (that is, only 0.14% of the rest of the planets and asteroids).
And still, by cosmic standards, our Sun is a small star. And the largest star known to mankind at the moment is UY Shield. And it is 1700 times larger than the Sun! If it were in the solar system, it would occupy the entire space up to the orbit of Jupiter.
4. A neutron star rotates at a speed of 500 revolutions per second
One of the most amazing objects in our universe is neutron stars. It would seem that by the standards of outer space they are quite “little ones,” up to 20 km in diameter. But at the same time, their mass exceeds (!) The mass of our Sun.
In fact, a neutron star is an ordinary star, squeezed by incredible force to such a density that one spoon of this substance is equivalent in mass to the approximately 1,000 great pyramids of Giza!
At the same time, neutron stars also rotate around their axis with an unimaginable speed (up to 500 revolutions per second!), Creating such a monstrously strong magnetic field that it literally "parses into atoms" everything that approaches it at a fairly close distance.
3. Cold welding works in space
We all know that on Earth, in order to join together two pieces of metal (that is, weld), they must be heated very strongly, so that they can merge with each other at the molecular level at the point of contact.
In outer space, this happens without heating: here you can simply attach two metal objects (from the same metal) to each other, and they immediately tightly stick together.
This is the very “cold welding" - in this case, the metal particles are connected by a vacuum. Hmm ... And why then, for example, a space station and a module docking to it do not “stick together”? Or why does not every artificial satellite drag a tail from space debris "stuck" onto it in orbit? Yes, because on Earth they are specially coated with a layer of oxides that prevent metal objects from “welding”.
2. Man can survive in outer space without a spacesuit for 90 seconds
Again, let’s recall science fiction films about space: in them, usually, a person suddenly thrown out of their will in an open vacuum, either quickly (literally in a matter of seconds) freezes to a block of ice, or explodes very unaesthetically from the inside.
In fact (but only in theory, because so far, thank God, no one has tested this in reality) a person can survive in space for up to 90 seconds if he manages to immediately breathe out all the air from his lungs.
But, of course, holding out these “only one and a half minutes” is an incredibly difficult task. If at least a little gas remains in the lungs, they will simply burst in the first seconds. After a few seconds, all the moisture in the human body will begin to boil and evaporate, really turning into a crust of ice on the skin.
At the same time, the skin will suffer from severe sunburn and cosmic radiation (and after it subcutaneous tissues will be very quickly affected).
All this unfortunate will feel, because his heart and brain will continue to live exactly those same one and a half minutes. Horror! It’s even scary to imagine ...
1. In the constellation Sagittarius there is an alcoholic gas and dust cloud
But this fact involuntarily recalls the old song of the Dune group: “If there were a lot of vodka, I would become a submarine.”
So, gentlemen, alcoholics: if you have at hand a very fast spaceship, then “only” 26 thousand light-years from
Earth, in the constellation Sagittarius, you can find a huge cloud of Sagittarius B2, consisting of billions of liters of gaseous vinyl alcohol. Hmm ... Although you can hardly drink it ...