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For many people astronomy is an interesting science stuffed with many astronomy fun facts. Everything from the size and temperature of our own star, the Sun, to the makeup of distant planets has been recorded. All of this information can be retold to entertain and enlighten people.

The Sun is a great font for astronomy fun facts. Our own star, which supplies us with all our heat and light is between 91 and 94.5 million miles from Earth. It’s not that nobody knows the precise distance, but rather because the Earth orbits the Sun in an ellipse, an uneven, orbit, so the distance varies depending on where the Earth lies in that orbit.

The Sun is only an average size star, yet it’s size is another terrific source of astronomy fun facts. As average as it is, it accounts for about 98% of all the material in our solar system. Even with the massive planet of Jupiter on our side, we’re still only a small 2% of non Sun stuff.

It would take the diameter of about 100 Earths to stretch across this average Sun. The solar winds created by the Sun reaches out about 50 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Or put another way, those solar winds go out about 50 AU’s. An AU being the distance from the Sun to the Earth, which is quite an fantastic fact, isn’t it?.

How about astronomy fun facts that don’t have much to do with the Sun then? How about our Moon? It’s the only non-Earth object that man has walked on until now. And one man actually travelled to the Moon but never left it. Dr. Eugene Shoemaker really liked the Moon but was rejected as an astronaut. After his death, he was cremated and his ashes were scattered over the Moon by the Lunar Prospector spacecraft in 1999.

There are many more astronomy fun facts about the Moon. It’s the site of what might become the oldest footprint known to man. Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind left a footprint or shoe print in the Moon’s dust that will probably still be visible in 10 million years time.

Lots of people, in fact about 13% of those polled in 1988, still believed the Moon to be made of cheese. And finally, the suits worn by the Moon-walking astronauts weighed 180 pounds on Earth but only 30 pounds on the Moon, because of the Moon’s reduced gravity. Talk about losing weight, eh?

Astronomy fun facts aren’t limited to our close astronomical neighbours. Looking at stars is like looking into the past. Some of the stars we see today in the night sky are so far away that their light takes a million years to reach us. Some of the stars you see may really be images of stars a million years old that aren’t even there in the present. There are over 1 x 10 ^22 stars in the universe. That’s a 1 followed by 22 zeros. The number is really quite staggering.

There are millions of astronomy fun facts and we could go on about them forever. But unfortunately, this article can not. So, please, just get out there and learn more about astronomy for yourself.

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