[Closed] Tell me your interesting facts about Space

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

Praise be to Douglas Adams.

Space has its own website;

[url= http://www.space.com/ ]http://www.space.com/[/url]

but I can't see a blog, facebook page or twitter account so I assume that space isn't really into social media.

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

I was just trying to find that quote via Google 🙂 Love it 😆

"...the total number of stars in the universe is greater than [u]all[/u] the grains of sand on [u]all[/u] the beaches of the planet Earth."

- [url= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan ]Carl Sagan[/url]

Absolutely mind-boggling and incredibly humbling when you think about it and a great response to anyone who doesn't believe that extra-terrestrial life is possible.

([url= http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~gmackie/billions.html ]the maths if you're interested[/url])

What is a space man ?
Its where you park a car man.

Space is a vacuum apart from the things in it.

There are TWO, not three golf balls on the moon - a favorite pub quiz question that usually states three if they get their questions from a pack, rather than self research them.

the 'third' golf ball arose as one of the spacemen fluffed his second shot and the film shows three strokes, although only two balls were ever used 🙂

oh, wait a second, you said interesting.....delete and move on!

<edited the there their mistake!!>

In the late 70s kids were convinced that the simultaneous consumption of space dust and a soft drink would cause instant death.

lol @ mudhark.

it's true.

We were very disappointed when someone at school tried it and survived with nothing more than bad wind.

Pluto isn't classed as a planet any more. It's a dwarf planet, so I guess the number of planets in the solar system is 8 if you're gonna be pedantic (i.e pub quiz!)

Paul Davies is the scientist responsible for monitoring and replying to any extra terrestial messages received on earth.

You don't explode in a vacuum if your suit springs a leak/falls off etc.

Nasa say "exposure to vacuum causes no immediate injury. You do not explode. Your blood does not boil. You do not freeze. You do not instantly lose consciousness.

Various minor problems (sunburn, possibly "the bends", certainly some [mild, reversible, painless] swelling of skin and underlying tissue) start after ten seconds or so. At some point you lose consciousness from lack of oxygen. Injuries accumulate. After perhaps one or two minutes, you're dying. The limits are not really known.

"You do not explode and your blood does not boil because of the containing effect of your skin and circulatory system. You do not instantly freeze because, although the space environment is typically very cold, heat does not transfer away from a body quickly. Loss of consciousness occurs only after the body has depleted the supply of oxygen in the blood. If your skin is exposed to direct sunlight without any protection from its intense ultraviolet radiation, you can get a very bad sunburn."

A nasa guy had an accidental exposure in the mid 60's and passed out at about fifteen seconds and says the worst thing was feeling the water on his tongue beginning to boil.

It's good for storage.

A nasa guy had an accidental exposure in the mid 60's and passed out at about fifteen seconds and says the worst thing was feeling the water on his tongue beginning to boil.

This is all good. Keep 'em coming.

hard interstellar vacuum still has 2 hydrogen atoms per cc!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/17/star_trek_scuppered

The really amazing and mind blowing thing about space is not how big it is but how small it was some 13 billion years ago. So small there was no space at all. And in that non space existed everything necessary to make a bicycle given enough time.

The temperature is 3 degrees (K) out there - that's blummin cold.

If you empty and then scrub the inside of St Paul's Cathedral completely clean and then place one speck of dust randomly inside it, proportionately there will be a billion billion billion billon to the power of a trillion times more matter inside the free space of St Paul's cathedral, than exists in the space of the entire universe.

Space is, indeed, really big.

[url=

Ultra Deep Field View[/url]

The smallest known star is the micro starlette called [i]Recubo Ardus Incendia[/i] and is no bigger than a London bus. It was discovered in 1991 and in the Coma Berenices asterism. Or in laymen's terms near past the leo constellation if you are looking from earth.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/17/star_trek_scuppered
/p>

though I think they've missed the point of "warp drive" which gets around the speed of light by some means, by which, in real space the craft might always be more or less stationary...

If you empty and then scrub the inside of St Paul's Cathedral completely clean and then place one speck of dust randomly inside it, proportionately there will be a billion billion billion billon to the power of a trillion times more matter inside the free space of St Paul's cathedral, than exists in the space of the entire universe.

I don't think that's a true fact, and for that matter I cannot work out what it means 🙁

You need to focus on the word "proportionately".

Also: there is more space than matter in your body...

a teaspoonful of white dwarf star would weigh about 15 tonnes,

and a teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh 5.5×1012 kg, about 900 times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza. 😯

I read once that when you see models of the soloar system them are massively out of scale, for example...

'if the full stop at the end of this sentence is to scale of the planet Earth then Pluto would be 30 miles away.'

Something like that anyway

The temperature is 3 degrees (K) out there - that's blummin cold.

There is no "degree" prefix for Kelvin, just 3 Kelvin. That's still quite cold though.

The static on a de-tuned TV set is casued by the background microwave radiation left over from the big bang.

Also, dark matter and dark flow are clearly made up to explain the unxeplainable.*

*IMO

The Female of the Species was their biggest hit

No one can hear you scream there.

[i]Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the "Milky Way".

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
[b]'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.[/b][/i]

(Praise be, too, to the Monty Python team).

yoshimi - Member

Also, dark matter and dark flow are clearly made up to explain the unxeplainable.*

*IMO

Actually, they are hypotheses based on our existing knowledge of how a quantum universe works and are being looked for, so that they can be measured to provide evidence for development into a theory.

If you drove 24 hours a day at 60mph it would take you 155 days to get to the moon

Caveat: If there were a road to the moon, which there isn't

Actually, they are hypotheses based on our existing knowledge of how a quantum universe works and are being looked for, so that they can be measured to provide evidence for development into a theory.

I'm trying to find a poem that's up in the underground at the moment, about the space where heaven once was turning out to be barren beyond imagining and how from out there it is terribly obvious that Earth is the only paradise. But I can't. 🙁

They might ask this question:

How many ears does Captain Kirk have ?

The answer is of course 3, the left ear, the right ear, and the final front ear.

LA Galaxy is actually an American Football (or 'soccer' team) not a galaxy.

Based on living in an infinite universe, there's an exactly version of the STW forum out there, spouting the same shite with identical versions of all of us posting on it.

You can even calculate exactly how far away that it's statistically likely to be with quite a simple equation based on how many ways there are of combining atoms and how many of them existing in a given volume of space (IIRC)

You need to focus on the word "proportionately".

yeah but when I do that it seems to say that St. Paul's is bigger than the universe 🙁

Hardest pub quiz question ever:

Where exactly is the Higgs Boson particle?

The universe is 13.7 billion years old and nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. So you would have thought the universe could not be more than 27.4 billion light years across.

But it doesn't work like that: space itself is expanding and without breaking Einstein's relativity theories the universe is thought to be 100 billion light years wide.

And every little bit of space is full of hot photons. Those pesky things get everywhere.

Astronauts have to undergo decompression before they go for a space walk - if their space suits were pressurised to the same level as the shuttle/space station they wouldn't be able to bend the arms.

mastiles_fanylion - Member

Actually, they are hypotheses based on our existing knowledge of how a quantum universe works and are being looked for, so that they can be measured to provide evidence for development into a theory.

I guess that is a galactic equivalent to using a random number to solve a mathematical equation?

No. A number used in that calculation, if following the reasoning outlined in my previous scenario, would be a logical extension of the nature of the equation, therefore applicable.

Another random space fact: space is shaped by gravity.

@clubber - and there is also a version of STW where there IS only one tyre for....

(and one where weeing in shoes is the ultimate form of politness, and one where televised bomber combat is the biggest national sport)

Space and time are relative, and the faster you go, the slower time goes.

Any photon which emitted from the big bag and is still travelling has been travelling for no time at all, from it's experience.

What tyres for the Moon?

The last mission to the International Space Station, I heard one of the astronauts had to do a space walk to fix the bog.

Does that mean the International Space Station has got an outside toilet?

simonfbarnes - Member

You need to focus on the word "proportionately".

yeah but when I do that it seems to say that St. Paul's is bigger than the universe

O.K. - I am proposing two space/matter scenarios.

1: a sterile St Paul's cathedral interior into which has been placed a speck of dust.

2: the universe in which matter exists.

Measure the proportion of matter in the cathedral to the space in which it exists (the walls of the cathedral are the limit of measurement).

Measure the proportion of matter in the universe to the space in which it exists.

As a proportion of scale, the measurement of the speck in the cathedral is greater than the measurement of matter in the universe by the number "billion billion..".

So is the universe actually [i]inside[/i] St Paul's cathedral? That's well strange. Like that bit at the end of Men In Black II when he opens the door and the whole universe is inside one left-luggage locker in a gigantic railway station in another larger universe...

First man to (allegedly) fly around the moon, whilst Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (allegedly) landed on it was Michael Collins. Not the Irish one though.

it's the final frontier, don't you know...

Any photon which emitted from the big bag and is still travelling has been travelling for no time at all, from it's experience.

Assuming it hasn't slowed down.

Photons don't speed up or slow down, that's kind of what they do, tear arse around at the speed of light.

Photons don't speed up or slow down, that's kind of what they do, tear arse around at the speed of light.

The "speed of light" varies depending on the medium it is travelling through.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_speed_of_light

Q. Who was the last man to walk on the moon?

A. Eugene Cernan

Q. What were the last words spoken on the moon

A. "Let's get this mother out of here"

Woppit's analogy (as it will become famously known) is a funny one because whilst it's easy to comprehend a speck of dust in St. Pauls, it's not easy to comprehend a billion billion billion to the power of a trillion (or whatever)
so it tries to simplify a concept using things that are imaginable, then blows it out the water with unimaginable numbers
or is that the point?
.
space is confusing

The varying speed of light cosmology, mostly proposed by Jean Pierre Petit, has no substantial evidence for it as is regarded as merely a concept though.However....It would require a rewrite of much of modern physics, to replace the current system which dependent on the constant c. which has been functioning quite well for quite some time now 🙂

A photon - as you know - is an electromagnetic (EM) wave.Its energy is described by e = h. n in a quantum of energy. All EM waves travel in the vacuum with the speed of light. A photon is a form of energy and
results from transformations of another forms of energy.

When the photon appears it behaves like all EM waves.It does´t need to be accelerated. All bodies emit EM waves,even a peace of ice. The question concerns more on the frequency. If you see the light - visible light - it covers a range of wave length between 400 and 700 nanometers.
frequency. If you see the light - visible light - it covers a range of wave length between 400 and 700 nanometers.

Waves do not need to be accelerated or decellerated. Particles
do, but we are talking about wave-photons, aren´t we ??And - besides of that - photons are generally regarded as particles with zero mass and no electric charge...

As physics stands currently, photons do not accelerate or decelerate no matter what wiki says.:) although they possibly and that's a really very big possibly in the future.

Other possible pub quiz answers:

Thomas Jerome Newton
Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike in 1964
Barbarella (1968)
Twiki and Dr. Theopolis
The Tempest
H.G. Wells

That should cover it.

jahwomble: isn't [i]c[/i] specifically the speed of light in a vacuum? It is a top speed, rather than the only speed.

If you can't slow it then what were these guys doing in 2000?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/655518.stm
http://focus.aps.org/story/v3/st37

"We know that light can be slowed to a modest extent in refractive and transparent media, for example water and glass, to velocities typically a factor of 1.5-2.0 times slower than c. But there is a limit to how much light can be slowed in normal optical materials, because the larger refractive index associated with slower propagation is inevitably accompanied by increased light absorption."
-- http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v397/n6720/full/397559a0.html

In a relatively short amount of time free space in a house can be filled with bike bits 😆

thepurist - Member
@clubber - and there is also a version of STW where there IS only one tyre for....

(and one where weeing in shoes is the ultimate form of politness, and one where televised bomber combat is the biggest national sport)

This is FACT (based on an infinite universe, again)

That's slowing the passage of light from a to b, not photons.When light enters a material, photons are absorbed by the atoms in that material, increasing the energy of the atom. The atom will then lose energy after some tiny fraction of time, emitting a photon in the process. This photon, which is identical to the first, travels at the speed of light until it is absorbed by another atom and the process repeats. The delay between the time that the atom absorbs the photon and the excited atom releases as photon causes it to appear that light is slowing down. in simple terms, the photons "bump" into the atoms and "bounce" off again so the light appears to travel slower, but the actual photons are not traveling any slower. They are just taking a more circuitous route from a to b

BigDummy - Member

So is the universe actually inside St Paul's cathedral? That's well strange. Like that bit at the end of Men In Black II when he opens the door and the whole universe is inside one left-luggage locker in a gigantic railway station in another larger universe...

No. The one is simply an analogy of the other, for the purposes of proportionate comparison, to illustrate how much space there is, compared to matter. In the universe.

in space, no one can hear you scream

Ah got ya. Thanks jahwomble.

[img] [/img]

Silver Surfer aka Norrin Rad of planet Zenn-La.

Became first Herald of Galactus when he sacraficed his normal life and the love of Shalla-Bal, in order to save his home world from the planet devourer. Wields the power cosmic, which is transmitted through his board.

Catch phrase, . . "This cannot be?"

It goes on, but those are the basics . . . hey ya never know . . ?

S'ok 🙂 I love this stuff.......

... not forgetting of course, that "space" is probably just "dark matter" rather than an absence of matter. I suppose that, if you perceived the dark matter as matter and the matter as space, you'd be a bit pushed to get around. Even with the proper tyres on...

What do you want more at the end of a relationship rather than the beginning?

Space

Measure the proportion of matter in the cathedral to the space in which it exists (the walls of the cathedral are the limit of measurement).

Measure the proportion of matter in the universe to the space in which it exists.

one billion billion billon to the power of a trillion = (10^18)^1,000,000,000,000 = 10^18,000,000,000,000

estimated density of the universe =~ 1 atom hydrogen per cubic metre = 1.66 * 10^-27 kg/m^3
assuming a grain of dust to be one milligramme and St. Paul's to be a one hundred meter cube gives a density of 10^-6/10^6 ie 10^-12 kg/m^3

so the actual density ratio is 10^-12/( 1.66* 10^-27 ) = 6 * 10^14

headfirst - Member

What do you want more at the end of a relationship rather than the beginning?

Space

Or Sex

Sorry, that should have been a [i]thousand[/i] billion billion billion etc...

Oops. 😉

[img] [/img]

Chickens rely on gravity to allow food to 'roll' down their gullets - humans and other animals have 'peristalsis' - the muscular movement propels food into the stomach.

Therefore, if you want to kill a chicken, take it into space, where the minimal gravity effect will cause it to starve.....obviously...

DrP

toys19: Personally I'd want sex more at the beginning rather than the end...

The OP is going to be very disappointed when he finds out the pub quiz topic is actually [i]"Man in [u]Spaced[/u]"[/i], Simon Pegg.

http://www.singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/stellar-realignment-theory

one billion billion billon to the power of a trillion = (10^18)^1,000,000,000,000 = 10^18,000,000,000,000

estimated density of the universe =~ 1 atom hydrogen per cubic metre = 1.66 * 10^-27 kg/m^3
assuming a grain of dust to be one milligramme and St. Paul's to be a one hundred meter cube gives a density of 10^-6/10^6 ie 10^-12 kg/m^3

so the actual density ratio is 10^-12/( 1.66* 10^-27 ) = 6 * 10^14

Ah,so thats where my pesky little Hope pad pin security clip has gone....

No wonder I can't find the ****er!!

GrahamS, if the topic was Spaced I'd be laughing. Most of this is way over my head tbh.

Intrigued by the reference to the Tempest.

Forbidden planet?

Top marks jahwomble 😀

Ta 🙂