Mental Floss

11 Space Facts That Will Change Your Perspective

If you have trouble comprehending the sheer scale of outer space, these facts should help you wrap your mind around it.
Bymentalfloss .com|
This just in: Space is big.
This just in: Space is big. | Sergey Nivens via Shutterstock

Space is inaccessible to the vast majority of us, but it’s not as far away as you might think. If you were somehow able to drive a car straight up at 50 miles per hour, you would reach space in an hour and 15 minutes. That’s shorter than some people’s daily commutes. 

We know the sun is massive; it accounts for 99.8 percent of all the mass in our solar system. To put things on a human scale, if the sun were the size of a basketball, the Earth would be no larger than a pinhead.

In this episode of The List Show, host and Mental Floss editor-in-chief Erin McCarthy covers some facts about space that are going to warp your perspective. So don your spacesuits, subscribe to Mental Floss on YouTube for new videos every week, and let’s lift off.

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