6 Astronomy Facts You Never Learned in School

When You’re Looking at the Stars You’re Looking Into the Past (sort of)

We say sort of because it is not actually how we think it is: the stars are just so far away from Earth that their light takes an incredibly long time to reach us. This is why some of the stars you may be admiring when you are stargazing might actually be already dead and you are just seeing the remnants of that star here as the light continued to travel.

This happened once with the Hubble Telescope in 1995— when they imagined the Pillars of Creation, a region in a Nebula that’s 7000 light years away from us. They were seen by the telescope, but they were unfortunately already destroyed (as it was discovered later) and the telescope showed what they looked like 7000 years before.

So, anything can be fooled by light, and you never know what you are looking at. Thankfully for us, most of the stars we gaze upon at night are still intact and they will continue to be even centuries after we will no longer be around.

HOT Ice Actually Exists

The universe is wider and weirder than we can actually imagine. This is how something like hot ice shouldn’t actually surprise you in the slightest, despite the fact that it sounds made up. But, on a planet outside our solar system (or an exoplanet) which is 33 light years away from us, such a thing exists.

The planet, Gliese 436b, is made out of different water elements, and the combination of them ends up producing burning ice! Due to the immense pressure of the atmosphere, the ice on the planet remains solid, while the extreme temperatures that can be found on it (about 570° F or 300° C) make it superheated! All the moisture then comes off as steam, but the ice remains solid, effectively creating burning ice.

If touching liquid nitrogen can completely freeze your fingers or hand if you are not careful, we wonder what landing on such a planet would do to a human!

A Piece of the Universe? Try the Desert

Have you ever wished you could have a genuine piece of the universe? Like a real piece of the moon? An actual souvenir rock from Mars? Well, you do not have to go to them to actually have one. When scientists tested the meteorites n Antarctica and the Sahara Desert, they found out that they were actually rocks that came from Mars!

How they ended up all the way on Earth we do not know, but who knows? Maybe one of the rocks you pick up from the desert could actually be from a planet so far away we cannot even comprehend the distance.