Amazing Facts

  • Earth is estimated to weigh 6,585,600,000,000,000,000,000 tons!   That is why its gravity is so strong.

  •  Jupiter’s moon, which is called Io, is so light and therefore has such low gravity that its volcanoes can send boiling rock 80 kilometres into the air!

  • Our sun is just one of over 100 billion stars which make up our galaxy which is called the Milky Way; and there are millions of galaxies in the Universe! 

  •  Summer on the planet Uranus lasts for 21 years, and so does winter!

  • It would take a car travelling at 160 kilometres per hour nearly 30 million years to reach our nearest neighbouring star.

  • The Skylab astronauts grew  3.8 – 5.7 centimetres (1.5 – 2.25 inches) due to spinal lengthening as a result of zero gravity. They shrank back to normal size when they got back to Earth.

  • Gravity is so strong that Apollo astronauts had to reach a speed of 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometres) per hour to leave the Earth and journey to the Moon; otherwise they would have been pulled back to Earth by gravity.
     
  • The US Space Agency NASA has a satellite called GRACE, which has calculated that Greenland is losing 100 billion tonnes of ice a year through global warming.   It calculates this by the small change in the pull of gravity (the greater the mass of ice, the greater the pull of gravity) over Greenland


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