Interesting facts about space

By Saksham Nayyar

The space consists of planets, stars, sun, dozens of moons, and millions of asteroids, comets, meteoroids, ice as well as several dwarf planets. So, let’s explore some surprising facts about the space that will blow your mind.

Facts about the Earth
1. The earth is the densest planet of all in the solar system, even denser than the giant Jupiter.
2. The earth’s rotation is gradually slowing down.
3. The planet earth has one moon and 2 co-orbital satellites.
4. Earth doesn’t take 24 hours to rotate on its axis.

Facts about the Solar System

1. About 99.86% of the solar system’s mass is found in the sun and the remaining 0.14% is found in other eight planets.

2. A total of 194 moons, 3,583 comets and 796,289 asteroids have been found in the solar system.

The edge of the Solar System- The Kuiper Belt

This is an area of the outer solar system that is estimated to stretch across 20 astronomical units (au) of space. (1 au is the distance between the earth and the sun). The largest kuiper belt objects are pluto, quaoar, makemake, haumea, ixion, and varuna. These are often referred to as trans-neptunian objects (tnos).

The Black Hole

Sagittarius is the supermassive black hole at the heart of the milky way galaxy. It lies in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. This black hole contains the mass of about 4 million suns.

• Did you know that the closer you get to a black hole, the slower time runs.
• The “point of no return” around a black hole is called the “event horizon.”