Five Amazing Space & Astronomy Facts

  • The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes launched in 1977 are still calling home. Carrying only cassette tapes and 256KB of memory the two probes have entered the interstellar space – the region beyond our solar system – their weak signal send temperature and other information back to earth.
  • Gravitational waves are ripples in the structure of space that move at the speed of light. They cause the distance between objects to increase and decrease. Coalescing binary neutron stars may be one (barely) measurable source of gravitational waves.
  • Neutron stars, what remains of some stars after they collapse, can rotate up to 600~700 times per second.
  • The Sloan Great Wall is a giant wall of clustered galaxies measuring 1.3 billion light-years.
  • A gamma ray burst or supernova can release as much energy as our sun will in its 10 billion year life.

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