Share your favorite astro-fact!

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We all have countless little facts squirreled away in our brains, picked up from books, shows, star parties, and more.

What’s your favorite astronomy fact that you’ve learned? What’s that tidbit that you always pull out at star parties or when trying to explain to friends just how amazing our universe is?

Whether it’s that our Moon is moving away from Earth about 1.5 inches ever year, that we can use specific types of variable stars and explosions to very accurately measure vast distances, or that the universe is 13.8 billion years old but 93 billion light-years across, what is your favorite astro-fact to share? Let’s all learn something new!

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The ISS travels nearly 10 TIMES FASTER than a bullet!

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Subaru vehicle brand is named after Pleiades and even the logo represents M45 (but not 7 stars, only 6)

I really didn’t know it for a long time, I knew this last year.

Nikolai.

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Another one is that, it’ll take 8 mins for us to know if the sun exploded!

And also, if we start walking (IMPOSSIBLE actually) to proxima centauri (closest star) today, it’ll take 950 MILLION YEARS to reach there!!!

Nikolai

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The moon is made of cheese they said . :laughing:

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Hi @Starrancher
Hope this doesn’t happen! :rofl: We will see a waning moon, and then, … We miss you moon!

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:laughing::joy::laughing::rofl: Supposedly at one time a cow jumped over the Moon too .
:grin:

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Okay . So what is the story behind this ? :laughing:

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When I worked for the Pioneer program my boss was getting ready to visit the tracking station in Australia, and he asked me to come up with some interesting facts for them. I calculated that all the energy that the DSN collected from over 20 years of tracking Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 was about the same as a snowflake hitting the ground. These spacecraft had 8 watt transmitters. That is about the same as a flashlight bulb or a Christmas tree bulb, and we were detecting that from several billion miles. The signal strength when Pioneer 10 was canceled was about -180 dB. The tracking stations at the time were using a 70 meter dish antenna.

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The Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light years away .

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My favourite astro-fact was the observation of Hale-Bopp comet, in middle of my town and a reddish sky

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@Starrancher , Andromeda galaxy is coming towards us!

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If you use the Earth as a reference frame. Onboard the ISS it appears to be stationary. Speed is always measured against a reference frame.

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Light takes time to reach Earth.
The stars we see in the night sky actually emitted their light millions of years ago.
For example, the star V762 Cas we see tonight emitted its light 16,308 years ago.
The star SDSS J122952.66+112227.8 we see today emitted its light 10 million years after the dinosaurs became extinct.

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Yeah it’s really cool :sunglasses:

Literally, we’re seeing the past!

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@Nikolai-De-Silva when i show people stuff in the deep sky i will tell them what was going on at the time here at the time. I explain that telescopes are really time machines. The look i get is priceless

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The farther away you see, the further back in time you go! :slightly_smiling_face: :sunglasses:

Absolutely :+1:

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How you guys been ? For some reason I haven’t been getting email notifications from this site . It’s been a couple weeks i think . I figured I’d check in . All kinds of stuff lights up that’s new . I wonder why I’m not getting notified .

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