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
An unprotected human can survive up to 1.5 minutes in space with no permanent bodily damage.
82
One pinhead of the sun's energy is enough to kill a person at a distance of 160 kilometers.
277
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
Jupiter has radio storms so strong that they can be picked up and heard by an AM radio.
16
Astronomer Percival Lowell believed that he was the first person to observe canals on Venus, but because of a faulty adjustment of the eyepiece on his telescope, he was in fact looking at the blood vessels in his own eye.
4
The Space Shuttle main engine weighs 1/7th as much as a train engine but delivers as much horsepower as 39 locomotives.
147
A neutron star (what remains after a Super Nova) is so dense that a portion of it the size of a sugar cube would weigh as much as all of humanity, or more than all the cars in the United States.
5