The light hitting the earth right now is 30 thousand years old.
163
There are 5 to 10 times more stars in the known Universe than there are grains of sand on all the world's beaches, but a single grain of sand has more atoms than there are stars in the known Universe.
20
It takes a photon 170,000 years to travel from the core of the Sun to the surface, but only 8 minutes to travel the rest of the way to Earth.
6
In 1859, the largest known geomagnetic storm struck the Caribbean, causing an aurora and telegraphs could even operate without a power source.
25
Mars had an oxygen-rich atmosphere around 4 billion years ago
13
When a massive power outage struck southern California in the 1990s, Los Angeles residents reportedly called 911 to express alarm about strange clouds hovering overhead; they were seeing the Milky Way for the first time.
31
A comet's tail always points away from the sun.
2