Astronomy Online

For many people astronomy is an interesting science filled with many astronomy fun facts. Everything from the size and temperature of our own star, the Sun, to the makeup of distant planets is recorded. All of this information can be recalled to entertain and enlighten people.

The Sun is a great source of astronomy fun facts. Our own star that supplies our heat and light is between 91 and 94.5 million miles from Earth. It’s not that nobody knows for certain. It’s that the Earth orbits the sun in an elliptical, uneven, orbit. The distance varies depending on where the Earth lies in that orbit.

  Astronomy fun facts about our average sized sun’s size.  As average as it is it accounts for about 98% of all the matter in the solar system.  Everything else, counting the earth and all the planets, is a tiny 2%.  It would take about 100 Earths to make it across this average sun.  The sun blows its solar wind out to 50 times the distance between the star and our earth.

Shall we turn to some astronomy fun facts that don’t have to do with the sun?  How about the moon?  It’s the only other space object, besides the earth, over which man has walked.  One fellow went there and stayed.  Dr. Eugene Shoemaker didn’t make the cut for astronauts.  After his death he was cremated and his ashes scattered over the moon by the Lunar Prospector spacecraft in 1999.

There are more astronomy fun facts about the moon. It’s the site of what may become the oldest footprint. Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” left a print in the moon dust that will like still be there in 10 million years. Many people, in fact about 13% of those asked in 1988, still believe the moon is made of cheese. And finally the suits worn by the moon walking astronauts weighed 180 pounds on Earth but only 30 pounds on the moon. Talk about an instant diet.

Fun facts about astronomy aren’t limited to our close neighbors. The stars we see are a gateway to the past.  It can take millions of years foe light from some stars to reach us.  Some of those stars you see may really be images of stars a million years old that aren’t even there in the present.  There are over 1 x 10 ^22 stars in the universe.  That’s a 1 followed by 22 zeros.  The number is staggering.

Astronomy fun facts can go on forever. But this article can’t. So get out there and learn about astronomy.