Original photo by NASA/ Unsplash
It being a vacuum and all, space isn’t often thought of as having a scent of its own. And while no one has directly smelled outer space — exposure without a helmet would be fatal — many astronauts have reported that it smells like a mix of gunpowder and burnt steak. The odor is most noticeable after an astronaut returns to their spacecraft through the airlock and removes their helmet, at which point the lingering scent can be detected by both the astronaut who had been outside the ship and their crewmates who remained aboard.
Oops, incorrect!
It's a fibIt’s actually quite average, with a radius of about 435,000 miles. The biggest known star, UY Scuti, has a radius of 738 million miles.
It’s been theorized that the source of space’s scent is dying stars, which release molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — a chemical compound also found in coal, oil, and food — as they near the end of their existence. There’s even a cologne named “Eau de Space” based on the smell, which was originally synthesized by biochemist Steve Pearce at NASA’s behest to better prepare astronauts for every aspect of the job. Based on his interviews with astronauts who had been to space, Pearce described the aroma as “hot metal, burnt meat, burnt cakes, spent gunpowder, and welding of metal.”
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Sunsets on Mars are the color ______.
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Sunsets on Mars are the color blue.
A day on Venus is longer than a year.
There are many reasons why humans will never go to Venus — it’s so hot and uninhabitable that it’s been called Earth’s “evil twin” — but if we did, we’d experience something hard to imagine: a day that lasts longer than a year. It takes the planet 243 Earth days to fully rotate on its axis, but only 225 days to orbit the sun, meaning that a year on Venus is indeed shorter than a day there. This is believed to be due to the planet’s thick and stormy atmosphere, which slows down its rotation.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
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