What do you think as you gaze up at the stars? That we're not alone, maybe? The vastness of everything?
There are lots to ask about space. The fact of the matter is that we don't have all the solutions. We know it's immense and majestic, but we don't really know how vast (or, for that matter, how beautiful) it is.
However, some of the stuff that we already realize is downright mind-boggling. Below, we've compiled some of the fascinating facts about space.
Uranus 'Tilted' on Its Side
Uranus seems to be a featureless blue ball at first sight, but upon closer inspection, this gas giant of the outer solar system is pretty strange. Next, for reasons physicists have not yet worked out, the planet is spinning to its side. The most plausible theory is that it suffered some form of one or more collisions in the ancient past. In either event, among the planets of the solar system, the tilt renders Uranus peculiar.
Uranus still has tenuous rings. The planet crossed in front of a star (from the point of view of Earth). Experts called it Planet C in 1977. At that time, the light of the star constantly blinked on and off. Hence, observers discovered that there was more than just a planet shielding the starlight. More recently, many years after its nearest approach to the sun, observers spotted storms in Uranus's environment, when the atmosphere must have been most heated.
Mars Has Largest Volcano Yet
Although Mars now appears silent, we know something has caused gigantic volcanoes to develop and erupt in the past. This involves Olympus Mons, the solar system's greatest volcano ever found. The volcano is equivalent to the height of Arizona at 374 miles (602 km) across. The highest peak on Earth, Mount Everest, is 16 miles (25 kilometers) high, or twice its height.
Volcanoes will expand to such an enormous scale on Mars since gravity on the Red Planet is much lower than it is on Earth. But it is not well understood how such volcanoes come to be in the first place. There is a controversy as to whether Mars has and is involved in a global plate tectonic environment.
There Are Super-Powerful Winds on Venus
With a high-temperature, high-pressure atmosphere on its surface, Venus could be a 'hellish world.' Ten of the highly protected Soviet Union spacecraft Venera survived just a few minutes on the soil when they landed there in the 1970s.
Yet the Earth has a bizarre atmosphere right above the surface. Scientists also learned that the upper winds circulate 50 times quicker than the movement of the Earth. Over long stretches, the European Venus Express spacecraft (which orbited the Earth between 2006 and 2014) monitored the currents, identifying intermittent fluctuations. It also found that, with time, the hurricane-force winds seemed to be stronger.
A Spacecraft Has Just Visited Every Planet
For more than 60 years, we have been studying space and have been fortunate enough to get close-up images of hundreds of celestial artifacts. Most importantly, we have sent missions to almost every planet we know in the solar system.
The majority of the flybys came from NASA's twin spacecraft Voyager, which left Earth in 1977 and is now sending data into interstellar space from outside the solar system. The Voyagers clocked visits to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune between them due to a prompt alignment of the outer planets.
There Could Be Proof of Life Anywhere in the Solar System
So far, no proof has been identified by scientists that existence occurs anywhere in the solar system. But as we hear more about how extreme microbes thrive in volcanic vents or frozen ecosystems underwater, more options open up for where other planets might live. This is not the creatures that people once feared were dwelling on Mars, but microbial existence is a probability in the solar system.
Microbial life is already deemed so possible on Mars that scientists take extra measures to sterilize spacecraft before bringing them out there. However, that isn't the only location. Somewhere in the seas of Jupiter's Europa, or even under the ice of Saturn's Enceladus, among other areas, with many frozen moons spread across the solar system, it is likely that there are microbes.
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