Interesting Astronomy Facts

The 200-inch mirror for the telescope on Palomar Mountain weights over 14 tons and is 27-inches thick. The telescope gathers 640,000 times as much light as the human eye.

If there were a bathtub big enough, Saturn would float in the water.

If a marshmallow were dropped from a foot above the surface of a neutron star it would have the energy of a modern atomic bomb

The star Betelgeuse is so large that if it were placed where our sun is, the surface would be just over half way to Jupiter .

The reason Venus is so bright is because the clouds are so dense that light bounces off them, making Venus appear bright to us on Earth

Suburu is Japanese for “Pleiades” (the official name of the constellation nicknamed The Seven Sisters).  Next time you see a Suburu, take a little closer look at the emblem, you’ll see it has 7 stars.

There are over a billion asteroids in our solar system of a diameter of 100 meters or more.

The largest known crater, the Chixulub crater in Mexico is 112 miles (180 km) across and is believed to have been caused by the asteroid that caused the dinosaur extinction 65 millions years ago.

The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was over 6 miles long, taller than Mount Everest. For scale, 6 miles is 31,686 feet. Airplanes typically fly at 30,000 feet.

Humans can only see roughly 4,000 stars with the unaided eye

Every star you can see in the sky with your unaided eye is part of the Milky Way Galaxy.

The North Star, Polaris, is NOT the brightest star in the sky, that title belongs to Sirius.

Polaris will not always be the North Star. The Earth wobbles on its axis, just like a spinning top, every 23,000 years. This wobble is called precession and at the end of our current precession the Earth’s northern axis will be pointed at the star Vega.