Space Facts for Kids
Out-of-this-world facts about the universe
Although sound cannot travel through the vacuum of space, astronauts inside the ISS can hear and feel small micrometeorite impacts through vibrations in the spacecraft's hull.
All eight planets in our solar system orbit the Sun in the same direction — anticlockwise when viewed from above Earth's North Pole — a result of how the solar system formed.
Nebulae are vast clouds of gas and dust in space where new stars are born. The most famous, the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula, shows newly forming stars inside towering columns of gas.
Seasons on Earth are caused by the planet's 23.5-degree tilt — not by its distance from the Sun. Earth is actually closest to the Sun in January, during the Northern Hemisphere's winter.
The oldest known star in the Milky Way, Methuselah, is estimated to be about 13.7 billion years old — almost as old as the universe itself.
Jupiter's enormous gravity acts as a shield for the inner solar system, capturing or deflecting many asteroids and comets that might otherwise strike Earth.
Space officially begins at the Kármán line, 100 kilometres above Earth's surface — the altitude where the atmosphere becomes too thin for aircraft to fly.
Saturn's moon Enceladus shoots enormous jets of water vapour and ice particles hundreds of kilometres into space from a subsurface liquid ocean, making it one of the top candidates for extraterrestrial life.
Planets orbit the Sun in ellipses — elongated circles — not perfect circles, as Johannes Kepler discovered in the early 1600s. Earth's orbit brings it 5 million kilometres closer to the Sun in January than in July.
Our solar system is surrounded by the Oort Cloud — a distant shell of icy bodies thought to be the source of long-period comets. It extends about 100,000 times Earth's distance from the Sun.