Infinity-Science

Astronomers see billions of light years across the universe, but it wasn't always this way. Under a billion years after the Big Bang, the cosmos was "foggy". Opaque hydrogen gas filled the early universe and this gas absorbed starlight. But the first generation of stars went to work clearing this fog away with their fierce ultraviolet light making it transparent, in a time called the era of re-ionisation

The first successful planetary space probe was the USA's Mariner 2, which flew past Venus in 1962.

In 1967 American physicist, John Wheeler, dubbed the term "black hole".

Near-Earth asteroids have orbits that cross the Earth's orbit. These could potentially impact the Earth.

Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to us after the Sun. It's a red dwarf about 4.24 light-years distant inside the G-cloud in the constellation of Centaurus. Proxima Centauri is very likely part of a triple star system with Alpha Centauri A and B.

Saturn's moon Mimas has been likened to the Death Star in the film Star Wars due to a huge crater called Herschel, that covers nearly a third of its diameter. Herschel is 88 miles wide, and has crater walls 3 miles high

There are approximately 10,000 pieces of equipment revolving around the earth. About 3,000 of these pieces are satellites, the rest are odd bits of Debris.

William Herschel made a detailed account of nebulosity and clusters and discovered the planet Uranus in 1781.

There are over 1 billion asteroids in our solar system with the diameter of 100 meters or more.

The light emitting from the Sun takes about 8 minutes to reach earth.

The lower a satellite's orbit, the faster it must fly to avoid falling back to the Earth. Most satellites fly in low orbits, 300 km from the earth.

Only one or two meteorites per day reach the surface of Earth.

In winter, the temperatures at the Mars' poles can go down to -140°C (-220 degrees Fahrenheit), these temperatures are so called that even carbon dioxide freezes.

⚛️| What’s the smallest particle? The Ancient Greeks had a name for the smallest particle: the ‘atom’, meaning ‘not cuttable’. But ever since Ernest Rutherford famously split the atom in experiments at Cambridge University around a century ago, it’s been clear that the name is a misnomer. He found that atoms contain a central nucleus around 10,000 times smaller than the atom itself. By the early 1960s, researchers firing electrons at atoms were finding hints that even the protons and neutrons making up atomic nuclei contain some kind of structure – now known to be quarks – trapped inside them. In the last few years, experiments at the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator have suggested that quarks may themselves be at least 10,000 times smaller than protons and neutrons. But there’s one subatomic particle that’s far smaller still, and not even the most powerful particle accelerator has come close to pinning down its size: the electron. Physics textbooks sometimes mention the so-called ‘classical radius of the electron’, which – at around three-million-billionths of a metre – is similar to that of a proton. But this comes from a theory that assumes the electron is just a ball of electromagnetic energy, which isn’t really true. A more reliable insight into its true size comes from using quantum theory, which ties the size of subatomic particles to their angular momentum (‘spin’) and their magnetic properties. In the case of the electron, measurements of these properties suggest that the electron is at least 1,000 times smaller even than quarks.

The diameter of a black hole is the diameter of the event horizon.

Earth's interior consists of the mantle and the core. Mantle and core represent by far the largest part of Earth's mass.

Pluto consists of rock with a very thick coating of ice.