World Space Week

 

Happy World Space Week!

World Space Week starts from 4th October and continues till 10th October. 

I have put a quiz at the end of this post, and here are a few out-of-the-world facts and general information about space.

• India had launched Chandrayaan-3 on 14 July 2023 and the soft landing took place on 23 August 2023. It was launched by ISRO, in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh, India, aiming to discover the south pole of the moon. The lander is called Vikram lander, and the rover is called Pragyan rover. The most mind-blowing discovery made by this rover is that there might be traces of gold on the south pole of the moon. 
• Sedna is a minor planet, or planetoid, that lies beyond the Kuiper Belt. Its home reaches to the far edges of the solar system, making it one of the most distant space bodies ever identified.
• Black holes, as you may know, are huge voids in space that are created on the death of a star. Despite what most people think, a black hole is actually not an empty space. It is an extremely dense region that packs a lot of mass in a small area. Think of an object with millions of times the mass of the Sun. However, all of this mass is concentrated in just a small single point. Black holes are hard to find as they do not emit light and are invisible. So, unless a person gets sucked in by a black hole when they get too close, they won't realize that it's there. Yikes!
• The Sombrero Galaxy, one of the more unusual-looking barred spiral galaxies, owes its name to its resemblance to the Mexican hat of the same name. It has a large central bulge and a bright nucleus, and its spiral’s arms pass through a thick dust lane, which is the ring encircling the central bulge. The galaxy’s appearance is due to our seeing it "edge on". Sombrero Galaxy is classed an unbarred spiral galaxy and can be found in the constellation of Virgo. It's estimated distance from Earth is 29 million light years.
• The earth is round! Right? Well, not quite. The earth has an uneven sphere shape, specifically known as geoid.

Here's the quiz:

Quiz: World Space Week - Google Forms

Picture credit: Freepik