Space Facts for Kids
Out-of-this-world facts about the universe
It takes our solar system about 225 million years to orbit the centre of the Milky Way once — a span of time sometimes called a 'cosmic year' or 'galactic year'.
Astronauts who have been on spacewalks report that space has a distinctive smell — something like hot metal, burnt steak, or welding fumes — detected when returning to the airlock.
Earth is not a perfect sphere — it is slightly flattened at the poles and bulges at the equator, a shape called an oblate spheroid.
The world's first satellite, Sputnik 1, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957, was about the size of a beach ball and beeped a radio signal as it orbited Earth.
There is no 'up' or 'down' in space — the concepts only make sense relative to a planet's gravity. In deep space, all directions are equally valid.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating since 1990, has made over 1.5 million observations, and has travelled more than 8 billion kilometres orbiting Earth.
A comet's tail always points away from the Sun — no matter which direction the comet is travelling — because it is pushed by the solar wind.
A day on Mars — called a 'sol' — lasts 24 hours and 37 minutes, making it the most similar to an Earth day of any other planet in our solar system.
Uranus is tilted on its side — it rotates at an angle of 98 degrees, likely because of a collision with an Earth-sized object billions of years ago.
The Sun produces energy by fusing hydrogen atoms into helium in its core, where temperatures reach 15 million degrees Celsius — this releases more energy in one second than humanity uses in a million years.