Category: Did You Know

The Great Red Spot—a giant storm on Jupiter—has been shrinking for decades and is now about 1.3 times Earth's diameter.

Photons emitted from the Sun’s surface take about 8 minutes and 20 seconds to arrive at Earth.

Mercury rotates so slowly that one full day–night cycle equals about 176 Earth days.

Advanced measurements suggest our observable cosmos contains roughly two trillion separate galaxies.

Despite being far from the Sun, Neptune spins rapidly, completing one rotation in about 16 hours.

Measured at roughly 1 kelvin, the Boomerang Nebula is even colder than the background of space itself.

Tidal interactions with the Moon slow Earth’s spin by about 1.7 milliseconds per century.

The density of matter in a stellar‑mass black hole is so high that a teaspoonful would weigh billions of tons.

Beneath its icy crust, Jupiter’s moon Europa is believed to harbor an ocean twice the volume of all Earth’s oceans combined.

Olympus Mons on Mars rises about 22 km (13.6 mi) high—nearly three times the height of Mount Everest.