Space Facts for Kids
Out-of-this-world facts about the universe
The Sun contains 99.86% of all the mass in the entire solar system. All the planets, moons, asteroids, and comets make up the remaining 0.14%.
A light-year is a unit of distance, not time — it is the distance light travels in one year, which is about 9.46 trillion kilometres.
If you fell into a black hole, the difference in gravity between your head and your feet would stretch you into a long, thin strand — a process scientists call spaghettification.
Jupiter's Great Red Spot is a storm that has been raging for at least 350 years, though it is now slowly shrinking. At its peak, it was three times the size of Earth.
The Moon is slowly moving away from Earth at a rate of about 3.8 centimetres per year — roughly the speed your fingernails grow.
Venus spins in the opposite direction to most planets. On Venus, the Sun rises in the west and sets in the east.
There are 'rogue planets' — planets that drift through the galaxy with no star to orbit, having been flung out of their solar systems billions of years ago.
The International Space Station travels at about 28,000 kilometres per hour and completes a full orbit of Earth every 90 minutes.
Scientists estimate the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, calculated by measuring how fast galaxies are moving apart and looking at the oldest light we can detect.
The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is not the remains of a destroyed planet — it is material that Jupiter's gravity prevented from ever clumping into a planet.