Astronomy is a fun science filled with many astronomy fun facts. This includes information about the size of stars and the distance of our earth from the center of our own Milky Way galaxy.
Astronomy fun facts about our own star, the sun, are almost endless. It’s somewhere between 91 and 94.5 million miles away from our home planet. It’s not that nobody knows for certain. It’s that the Earth orbits the sun in an elliptical, uneven, orbit. The distance fluctuates throughout 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%. Over 1.6 million earths would fit inside this star. An AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun. The solar winds extend 50 AU’s from the sun.
Shall we turn to some astronomy fun facts that don’t have to do with the sun? What about the moon? In all the universe man has only walked upon the earth and the moon. 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.Tthe suits worn by the moon walking astronauts weighed 180 pounds on Earth but only 30 pounds on the moon. I’d bet the astronauts thanked their lucky stars for that.
Astronomy fun facts aren’t limited to our close neighbors. The stars we see are a gateway to the past. It can take millions of years for light from some stars to reach us. Some stars we see may no longer even be there. There are over 1 x 10 ^22 stars in the universe. That’s a 1 followed by 22 zeros.
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