27 Space Facts for Kids That Are Totally Out of This World

9. It takes eight minutes and 19 seconds for light to travel from the sun to Earth.

10. The footprints on the moon will be there for 100 million years. 

11. A neutron star can spin 600 times in one second. 

12. Jupiter is the fastest spinning planet in the solar system (it only takes about 10 hours to complete a full rotation on its axis). 

13. Sound does not carry in space. 

14. The Earth’s core is as hot as the surface of the sun. 

15. The very first animals in space were fruit flies…they were sent up in 1947 and recovered alive. 

16. In 2011, ten-year-old Kathryn Aurora Gray discovered a supernova (a star that has run out of energy, explodes and then collapses before it dies) that no one else had seen before. 

17. Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, has saltwater geysers that are 20x taller than Mt. Everest. 

18. Saturn’s rings are made from trillions of chunks of orbiting ice. 

19. Alpha Centauri isn’t a star, but a star system. It is 4.22 light years away. 

20. One day on Venus is almost 8 months on Earth. 

21. Golf is one of only two sports ever played on the moon. In 1971, Alan Shepard hit a ball with a six-iron while on the moon as part of the Apollo 14 mission. The other sport was a javelin toss, during the same visit. 

22. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is the Solar System’s longest raging storm: it has been observed for more than 200 years. 

23. Mercury and Venus do not have moons. (They are the only two planets in our solar system that don’t!)

24. There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sands on Earth. 

25. Mars has the biggest volcano (so far) ever discovered in the solar system. 

26. Jupiter’s red spot, which scientists have been observing for 150 years, is changing shape and might be shrinking. 

27. Since there is no atmosphere in space, it is completely silent.