Raging Science

It rains diamonds on Uranus and Neptune.

Meteors appear as different colors depending on their chemical makeup. Next time you see one, dazzle your friends by being able to point out that if it appeared yellow, it was high in iron. Red for nitrogen/oxygen, purple for calcium, pale green/blue for magnesium, orange for sodium.

Since we're talking space debris, let's talk classifications. A meteoroid is what we're talking about before it enters our atmosphere. Once it does, and starts to burn up, it's then a meteor. If it doesn't burn completely and manages to make it to the ground, you have yourself a meteorite.

The Taurids, also called the Halloween Fireballs, is brought to us from passing through a stream of debris from comet Encke. As dust hits our atmosphere it burns up and gives us the meteor shower we know as The Taurids.

If you can't get out and look up for the first stream, catch the Northern Taurids, which peak between Nov. 11th and 12th.

The Southern Taurids peak Nov. 4th and 5th, so make sure to get outside and look up at the night sky. They are visible from nearly everywhere on Earth except for the South Pole. While the Taurids typically produce a low number of visible events an hour, they are strikingly bright and slow-moving.

Now that November is here, it is time to get ready for the Taurid meteor shower. The shower comes in two streams: the Southern Taurids, and the Northern Taurids.

Interesting and somewhat surprising fact: there are actually more trees on Earth than there are stars in the Milky Way. Our planet is home to three trillion trees, while our Milky Way galaxy is only home to an estimated measly one to four billion stars.

The International Space Station circles our Earth at about 17,500 miles (28,000 kilometers) per hour.

Each 24 hours, the ISS makes sixteen orbits around the Earth, enabling those on the orbital outpost to see sixteen sunsets and sunrises each day.

Scientists studying the dust clouds in the middle of our Milky Way galaxy dicovered something very interesting. It very possibly smells like rum and tastes like raspberries, due to a cloud of ethyl formate.

Astronauts returning from space walks have reported that space has the scent of fried or burning steak.

The Martian day is called a "sol" and is about 39 minutes and 35.244 seconds longer than an Earth day.

How long are days on other planets? Venus has the longest days, at 5,832 very hot hours. Next is Mercury at 1,408. We start to go down dramatically from there, with Mars at 25 hours and Earth a close second at 24. Uranus comes in at 17, Neptune at 16, Saturn at 11 and Jupiter at 10.

Where do we get the word "astronaut" from? The word "astronaut" comes from the Greek words "astron" (star) and "nautes" (sailor). An astronaut is a sailor of the stars, figuratively speaking, of course. Very beautiful.

Discovered in 2004, exoplanet 55 Cancri e is a super-Earth exoplant made of carbon, mostly as diamonds and graphite. The diamonds would be worth roughly 26.9 nonillion dollars. A nonillion is a one followed by 54 zeros.

The first living creatures intentionally brought to space were fruit flies, launched aboard a U.S. V-2 rocket in 1947.

three clouds of gas and dust with luminous ripples throughout, floating in a bright sea of stars.

You've seen this picture before. These are called the Pillars of Creation. A cradle of about-to-be formed stars slowly heating up inside clouds of gas and dust.

A nebula in the middle of a black sea of stars. A cloud of gases and dust that expands at each end and constricts in the middle.

The coldest known place in the universe is the Boomerang Nebula.

The Boomerang Nebula is only one degree above absolute zero (about -460 degrees Fahrenheit).

A slow goodbye: The Moon is slowly drifting away from Earth at a rate of about 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) per year.

A neutron star's density gives it very high surface gravity; with escape velocity ranging from a third to half the speed of light.

The Big Bang was a rapid expansion, not a giant explosion; a term that has lead to the confusion of thousands since 1949.

The magnetic fields of magnetars, a type of neutron star, are strong enough to distort the shapes of atoms.

Brown dwarf stars, rich in gaseous iron, cool and condense into metallic clouds that pour down liquid iron rain.

In a constellation ten thousand light years away (Aquila is its name) exists a cloud made of alcohol, larger than the diameter of our entire solar system. It holds enough alcohol to make four trillion trillion drinks. Cheers!

The charged particles of Jupiter's magnetosphere come from solar wind, but also from its volcanically active moon, Io.

Amazing Space: Jupiter's magnetic field is 20,000 times stronger than Earth's.

Bennu is 4.5 million years old, and research into what has been brought back shows it is highly rich in water and carbon.

The Bennu samples also contain minerals likely rich in sulfur and iron, and compounds that include carbon and hydrogen.  It is material incredibly rich in organic material.