Here are some cool facts about the space, which some of us know and some of us do not. You may find these facts interesting because they amazed me.
Earth’s atmosphere
Above the ground, the Earth’s atmosphere starts and goes up to 10,000 km into space, where it merges into the space void.
The atmosphere contains mainly gas. Clouds, stars and the Moon are the most visible things in the atmosphere. Clouds lie between 2 to 20 km above the Earth’s surface and contain around 40T gallons of water.
The temperature of the atmosphere varies. The temperature is cooler at a distance between 50 – 85 km from Earth, averaging -90 degrees Celsius. But when we go above that, from 90 km to between 500 km and 1000 km, it becomes hotter, going up to 1500 degrees Celsius.
The hotness keeps us safe from the asteroids because in that hotness the asteroids get burned before hitting the Earth.
Space
Around 100 km above us (ground) is the Karman Line, an imaginary boundary that separates Earth from space. From this line, the outer space starts.
Space is pin-drop silent like we have seen in the Interstellar movie. Nobody knows how many stars are there in the space. It is impossible to tell because the space size is very big. Let’s talk about our star, Sun along with our Moon.
Sun and Moon
Sun and Moon sizes look the same but they aren’t. The sun is 400 times larger than the Moon, yup! They both look the same size because the sun’s distance from the Earth is 400 times that of the Moon. After reading this, lunar eclipses and solar eclipses can no longer fool us, into thinking that the sun and Moon have the same size. But both the eclipses look nice.
Suraj (sun in Hindi) and Yuèliàng (Moon in Chinese) look steady in the sky, but they are moving fast. Suraj along with our solar system is traveling at the speed of 200kms per second. Yuèliàng orbits around the Earth at the speed of 3683kph.
The sun is almost a perfect sphere and the Moon is slightly flattened. Sun has an atmosphere and Moon doesn’t have any. Sun has a huge amount of gravitational pull, which makes all the planets and dwarf planets from afar distance in our solar system, revolve around. Moon has a limited gravitational pull, which is one-sixth of the Earth’s gravitational pull.