Eight facts you didn’t know about space
DID you know we are actually all made of stars? Or the crazy costs of a space suit? Some of these facts are out of this world.
THIS week saw the Blu-ray & DVD release of COSMOS: A Spacetime Odyssey.
To mark the home entertainment release of this awesome series, here are eight facts about
space that you probably didn’t know... OK, that I didn’t know until researching this article.
1. A run-of-the-mill NASA spacesuit costs around A$12 million. Although 70% of this is for the Buzz Lightyear-esque backpack & control module. To give a little context, A$12 million would cover the annual salaries of around 212 Aussie nurses.
2. We are made of stars! To quote the host of Cosmos: “Stars get so hot that the nuclei of the atoms fuse together deep within them to make the oxygen we breathe, the carbon in our muscles, the calcium in our bones and the iron in our blood. You, me, everyone: We are made of star stuff.”
3. If you fell into a black hole, you would stretch like spaghetti. Enough said on that the
better.
4. A gigantic asteroid could hit us pretty soon. The greatest chance in human history, according to astronomers, of a large asteroid colliding with the earth and wiping life out is in 2029. Although there is less than a 3% chance ‘Apophis’ will smash into us, if it does, all plant & animal life will become extinct.
5. If we scaled the entire timeline of the cosmos to a calendar year, the recorded history of human life to present day would be 14 seconds: “Every person you’ve ever heard of lies right in there. All those kings and battles, migrations and inventions, wars and loves, every thing in the history books happened here in the last 14 seconds of the cosmic calendar.” Another nugget from the legendary Neil deGrasse Tyson.
6. More than one million of our worlds would fit into the sun. Although when compared to other stars, the sun is relatively small (a G2 dwarf star, in fact), it’s still a million times bigger than our teeny tiny plot of the Universe. A football to our grain of sand.
7. The moon smells like the wild west: Apollo astronauts all describe our only natural satellite as smelling like gunpowder & feeling extremely soft – like walking on a big ball of fluff (picture Care Bears)
8. Contradicting the last point entirely, it is arguable that the earth has more than one moon... scientists have discovered several asteroids that are more or less following us as we move around the sun. Stalkers!
Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey is available now on Blu-ray & DVD.
Special features: deleted scenes, Cosmos: a vision reborn, Cosmos at Comic-Con, interactive Cosmic Calendar.
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