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
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
The light hitting the earth right now is 30 thousand years old.
163
Neil Armstrong, the first man to step foot on the moon, carried with him a piece of cloth and wood from the original 1903 Wright Flyer.
12
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
In 1859, the largest known geomagnetic storm struck the Caribbean, causing an aurora and telegraphs could even operate without a power source.
25
An international team of astronomers has spotted the farthest known gravitational lens and, as Albert Einstein predicted, it is a galaxy that deflects and intensifies the light of a much further object.
9
The last time that the Sun was in its current position in space around the Milky Way, dinosaurs ruled the Earth.
10