Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does the Moon Always Show Us the Same Face?
The Moon does spin, but exactly once for every trip round the Earth, so one side always faces us, and the side we never see is not dark at all.
Space and time
Some of the oddest questions are about the largest things there are: why the night sky is dark, how the length of a day has changed, and what a scientist means by a unit of time you may only know from a figure of speech.
Others are closer to home and just as strange: why an hour in a waiting room drags, or why the way back always seems shorter. Every article here is fact-based.
Articles
Fact-based Weird Facts
A Day on Venus Lasts Longer Than Its Year
Venus needs about 243 Earth days to turn once and only 225 to circle the Sun, yet the gap between two sunrises there is just 117 days.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Do Stars Twinkle When Planets Shine Steadily?
The stars are not flickering at all: their light is being nudged about by the air above your head, and a planet looks calm for a surprisingly simple reason.
Fact-based Weird Facts
There Are More Trees on Earth Than Stars in the Milky Way
A global count using satellites and four hundred thousand forest plots put Earth's tree total near three trillion, several times the stars our whole galaxy is thought to hold.
Fact-based Odd Places
After the Rain, Bolivia Gets the World's Biggest Mirror
The Salar de Uyuni is so flat that a thin film of rain turns it into a mirror 129 kilometres across, and when it dries, satellites use it to check their eyesight.
Fact-based How It Started
The Tiny Pocket on Your Jeans Was Made for a Watch
That little pocket tucked inside the front pocket of your jeans is older than phones, earbuds and even wristwatches: it was made to carry a pocket watch.
Fact-based Weird Facts
A Teaspoon of Neutron Star Would Weigh a Billion Tons
Squeeze more than the mass of our Sun into a ball the size of a city and you get a neutron star, where a single teaspoonful of matter would weigh about a billion tons on Earth.
Fact-based Weird Facts
You Cannot See the Great Wall of China From the Moon
It is one of the most repeated facts in the world, and it is wrong: from the Moon the wall is invisible, and even from orbit it is so hard to spot that astronauts argue about it.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does the Moon Look Bigger Near the Horizon?
A rising full moon can look enormous, yet a camera shows it is no wider than when it rides high in the sky, which means the giant moon is being built inside your head.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Tardigrades Spent Ten Days in Open Space and Lived
Three thousand microscopic animals were bolted to the outside of a spacecraft, the lids were opened, and most of them came back perfectly fine.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Is the Way Back Always Shorter?
The journey home takes exactly as long as the journey out, and it is over noticeably sooner, which is a strange thing for an hour to do.
Fact-based Weird Facts
A Day Was Half an Hour Shorter When Dinosaurs Were Alive
A 70-million-year-old fossil shell shows that a day then lasted about 23 and a half hours, and a year held 372 of them.
Fact-based Weird Facts
A Jiffy Is a Real Unit of Time
The word you use for hurry up is also a genuine technical term, and depending on who is using it, a jiffy lasts anything from a fiftieth of a second to a few trillionths of one.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Does Time Move Slower in a Waiting Room?
The clock ticks at the usual speed, but psychologists explain why waiting and boredom make every minute feel stretched.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why the Universe Keeps the Lights Low
If the cosmos is packed with billions of glittering stars, why does the night sky opt for a cozy, pitch-black blanket instead of a blinding neon glow?
Fact-based Weird Facts
T-Rex Never Met a Stegosaurus — They Missed Each Other by 80 Million Years
Stegosaurus lived around 150 million years ago, T. rex about 68 to 66 million years ago. We are closer in time to T. rex than it was to Stegosaurus.