20 Awesome Facts About Space

1. The core of a star reaches 16 million degrees celsius. A single grain of sand this hot would kill a human from 150 km away.

2. The sun accounts for 99.86 of all mass in our solar system.

3. The 40,000 km-wide Great Red Spot on Jupiter is a storm that's been brewing for at least the past 200 years. To put it into perspective, the Earth could fit in the Red Spot three times over.

4. Because there's no atmosphere on the Moon, the 1969 footprints by Apollo 11 are still there today.

5. Mars is the home of Mount Olympus, the tallest volcano in the solar system. At 21 km high, and 60 km wide, it's roughly the size of Ireland.

6. Only three people have died outside our atmosphere.

7. Jupiter is two and a half times larger than all the other planets in the solar system combined.

8. It takes the average photon 170,000 years to travel from the sun's core to the surface.

9. It takes that same photon only 8 minutes to then reach Earth.

10. Over a thousand planets were discovered in the last 20 years.

11. Contrary to popular belief, the Earth has more than one moon. Cruithne "The Earth's Second Moon" is one of six quasi-satellite asteroids that rotate in a near identical orbit to the Earth.

12. All of the planets in our solar system could fit in the space between the Earth and the Moon.

13. You can see another galaxy with the naked eye: The Andromeda Galaxy, 2.2 million light years away.

14. Astronauts left a mirror on the Moon's surface during the Moon landing. Scientists used this mirror to bounce a laser off it and accurately measure the distance to the Earth.

15. Scientists recently discovered a planet lost in the glare of a supernova for 21 years.

16. The sun is over 300,000 times larger than the Earth.

17. The sun's temperature is approximately 9,941 degrees Fahrenheit.

18. An object the size of Mars collided with the Earth 4.5 billion years ago.

19. The Sun travels around the galaxy a journey of 100,000 light years once every 200 million years.

20. A tablespoon of a neutron star would weigh about 10 billion tons.