5 Popular Space “Facts” You Didn’t Know Were Wrong
By: Bernie Robert
Tags: Universe, Science, Space, Space Exploration, Future

5 Popular Space “Facts” You Didn’t Know Were Wrong

Jupiter is not "just" gas. Image source: Unsplash

Most people think they know a lot about space—mostly facts gotten from the odd misremembered documentary. And most of the time, they are dead wrong.

Here are five popular space “facts” that are all lies.

1. Planets and stars are spherical—FALSE

It’s easy to believe that planets and stars are round balls of matter orbiting in flawless circles. But that’s far from the truth. In fact, nothing in the Universe is perfectly spherical.

It all comes down to their rotation. When planets and stars form, they condense from hot, spinning material, which keeps spinning due to inertia. This rotation gives rise to a centrifugal force pulling outward at their equators. Thus, they bulge outwards slightly, and aren’t perfectly round.

Plus, most celestial bodies are pulled by the gravities of other around them, much like the Sun and Moon pull on Earth. This inevitability leads to bumps and bulges on their surface. Hence, they aren’t spheres, but spheroids.

But hey, don’t feel too bad. At least you didn’t think the Earth was flat (or did you?).

2. Oxygen deprivation is space’s murder weapon—FALSE

Imagine this:

There’s a fault on the exterior of your spacecraft, but none of the spacesuits are primed for action. You know that inky, airless space waits outside, but you come up with an ingenious solution — you’ll hold your breath.

Big mistake, sir.

One property of space that people tend to forget is that it’s a vacuum. This means that it exerts no pressure on your body. The boiling points of liquids, including blood, decreases as pressure decreases, so if there’s no pressure around you, your blood would evaporate.

You’ll be dead in about six seconds, more or less. Depressurization is the real space killer.

Holding your breath won’t save you in space.

In case you ever find yourself stranded all alone in the void of space without your suit, I advise you to exhale deeply. You’ll pass out and die painlessly. The alternative is having your lungs explode inside you—yikes.

3. The Moon is close to Earth—FALSE

Many people underestimate how difficult the Apollo 11 landings must have been. After all, the Moon is just a few blocks over, right?

Actually, no. Here’s what I mean.

Earth and the Moon are separated by 293,00 miles. Image source: ESA

The Moon is actually very far away from Earth—about 293,000 miles. You could fit all the planets in the space between them. The Apollo 11 astronauts were travelling incredibly fast, so they took 76 hours to get there.

This also explains why the Moon doesn’t dominate our view of the sky. In contrast, the Sun is about the same size as the Moon as seen from Earth even though it’s 93,000,000 miles away, because it is so huge.

4. We see a supernova when it happens—FALSE

From Earth, stars look like little pinpricks of light only a few inches apart. In reality, they’re huge balls of plasma separated by millions—even billions—of miles.

The Universe has a speed limit, what we call the speed of light — about 299,792.458 m/s (about 186,000 miles/s). Nothing can ever move faster than this, including light from a supernova.

Astronomers commonly measure distances in light-years, the distance light travels in one year—9.461 × 1012km . If a supernova happens five light-years away from Earth, it means light from it has taken five years to reach us. That means we are seeing it the way it looked five years ago.

You can’t live-stream star deaths. It’s just not possible.

5. You can go right through Jupiter—FALSE

Despite being called gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn are not just floating balls of gas.

The gas giants are made of large quantities of hydrogen and helium. At ordinary temperatures and pressures, these gases behave as you’d normally expect them to. But as you go deeper into the planet, they are compressed into a dense, wall-like state. Further inside, you’d hit a hot, metallic core of hydrogen.

At this stage, the buoyancy forces would become stronger than gravity, so you’d be shoved back upwards until both forces equalize. You’d thus be stuck drifting around in total darkness and at extreme temperatures. Pretty horrible, if you ask me.

And all this is assuming you aren’t instantly crushed by the extreme pressures and melted by the high temperatures. In fact, the centre of Jupiter is hot enough to melt tungsten, one of the most heat-resistant elements known to man.