The weight of the earth is about 6,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons!
Our sun burns hydrogen and converts it into helium, and thereby radiates energy at such a rate that it’s mass decreases by four million tonnes per second. However, because of its size it will take more than 6,000 million years till it is burned out.
The brightest known star is the Carinae, as bright as 4 million suns. In spite of its brightness, you cannot see it with your naked eye because it’s too far away.
It is extremely difficult to find planets in outer space. But despite this, more than 200 planets have been detected until April 2007!
Rockets for a space flight need about 530 kg fuel for every extra kg they have to put into space.
The speed of light is unimaginable. It travels so fast, that it needs just one second for travelling 7.5 times around Earth. However, it needs more than 8 min to reach our sun and about 4 years to the nearest star.
The distance to the Andromeda Galaxy (the nearest galaxy similar to our Milky Way) is about 2.5 million light years from us, quite a long way!
The driest area on Earth is the Atacama desert in Chile. No rain has ever been recorded there.
More than half of the earth’s land area, namely deserts, ice regions, mountains, and wild scrub, is uninhabitable. About half of mankind lives on only one-thirties of the available land.
The South Pole was once, namely about 450 million years ago, in the middle of the Sahara Desert.
The saltiest sea in the world is the Dead Sea. It is so salty that no animal can live in its water. You don’t need to swim, and you won’t drown easily; you can just float on the surface and read the newspaper if you like.
News for the 'gold bugs': The world’s oceans contain about 200 times more gold than all the gold has been mined until now!
In the far north of Norway, Sweden and Finland, the sun shines for about three months without setting each summer.
The first city with a population of more than one million people was London.
Wondering about all the never-ending dust in your house? It has been found that more that 70% of this nuisance comes from our shed skin.
Who invented the electric chair? It was a dentist – typical!
The Sinclair ZX81 computer (available about 30 years ago) had a memory of 1KB. The current iTunes have about 50,000 times more than that.
The structure of each snowflake is different from other snowflakes.
You can only hear a whip crack if the end of it travels faster than the speed of sound.
The largest hailstone ever recorded was as big as a football and weighed several kg.
E is the most used letter in the English alphabet. Q is the least used letter.
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