FACTS ABOUT SPACE

There is no atmosphere in space so sound has no way to travel to be heard. Astronauts use radios to communicate with each other while in space as radio waves can still be sent and received.

Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system and has an average surface temperature of around 450° C. Mercury is closer to the Sun than Venus, however; Mercury has no atmosphere to trap heat so Venus is hotter.

Apart from Earth, of all the planets in our solar system Mars is the one most likely to have had life on it. In 1986, NASA found what they thought may be fossils of microscopic living things in a rock recovered from Mars.

Space is huge so it is impossible to precisely predict how many stars we have. Right now, scientists and astronomers use the number of stars only within our galaxy, The Milky Way, to estimate. That number is between 200-400 billion stars and billions of galaxies so the stars in space are completely uncountable.

Discovered in 1705 by Edmond Halley, the famous comet, “Halley’s Comet”, was last seen in 1986 and is only seen once every 75 to 76 years.

Yale University scientists suggest that there is a rocky planet called 55 Cancri. According to the research, this planet may have a surface made up of graphite and diamond. The Moon has no atmosphere, which means there is no wind to erode the surface and no water to wash the footprints away. This means the footprints of the Apollo astronauts will be there for millions of years.

Venus has a slow axis rotation which takes 243 Earth days to complete its day. The orbit of Venus around the Sun is 225 Earth days, making a year on Venus 18 days less than a day on Venus.