0 WHAT IS THE HOTTEST PLANET IN OUR UNIVERSE?

VENUS!

The surface of Venus is often said to resemble Hell.

Ok, so the universe is too huge for such a question.  As a matter of fact all articles I read pointed to venus... until I came across a more recent artilce -
Scientists discover the hottest planet in the universe... where the temperature is a scorching 3,200C!  - Jan 2011
A planet they called WASP-33b - which now means, if they discovered this hot planet, then they will eventually discover others since, obviously, there are more out there.  However, I'll go on about Venus since it's in our Solar System and a planet with a name we're all familiar this side of our universe!

Now you would think the hottest planet in the universe would be Mercury since it's the planet that orbits closest to the sun.  It receives more sunlight per square meter than any other planet in the Solar System but NO!  The hottest planet is Venus!

The side of Mercury facing the Sun can get as hot as 700 Kelvin (426 degrees Celsius). But without an atmosphere to trap the heat, the side facing away from the Sun gets down to only 100 Kelvin (-173 degrees Celsius).  Venus, on the other hand, has a very dense carbon dioxide atmosphere. The atmosphere acts like a blanket, trapping the heat, and keeping the planet very hot.  The atmospheric mass is 93 times that of Earth's atmosphere while the pressure at the planet's surface is about 92 times that at Earth's surface—a pressure equivalent to that at a depth of nearly 1 kilometer under Earth's oceans. 
The temperature of Venus is 735 Kelvin (461 degrees C) everywhere on the whole planet. And that makes Venus the hottest planet in the Solar System!

Studies have suggested that several billion years ago the Venusian atmosphere was much more like Earth's than it is now, and that there were probably substantial quantities of liquid water on the surface, but a runaway greenhouse effect was caused by the evaporation of that original water, which generated a critical level of greenhouse gases in its atmosphere.

Fast Fact:

Venus rotates about its axis in the opposite direction to most planets in the Solar System.

Source(s):  universetoday.com, wikipedia,

0 WHAT IS THE DEEPEST IMAGE OF THE UNIVERSE EVER TAKEN?

Image of the HUDF includes galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colors. The smallest, reddest galaxies, of which there are approximately 10,000, are some of the most distant galaxies to have been imaged by an optical telescope, existing at the time shortly after the Big Bang  
Pic by JJ Harrison

The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF) is the deepest image of the universe ever taken.  The image is of a small region of space in the constellation Fornax, composited from Hubble Space Telescope data accumulated over a period from September 24, 2003, through to January 16, 2004. 

Pointed at a single piece of space for several months — a spot covering less than one-tenth of one-millionth of the sky, it is the deepest image of the universe ever taken, looking back approximately 13 billion years (between 400 and 800 million years after the Big Bang), and it will be used to search for galaxies that existed at that time. The HUDF image was taken in a section of the sky with a low density of bright stars in the near-field, allowing much better viewing of dimmer, more distant objects. The image contains an estimated 10,000 galaxies. In August and September 2009, the Hubble's Deep Field was expanded using the infrared channel of the recently attached Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). When combined with existing HUDF data, astronomers were able to identify a new list of potentially very distant galaxies.

Located southwest of Orion in the southern-hemisphere constellation Fornax, the image covers 11.0 square arcminutes. This is just one-seventieth the solid angle subtended by the full moon as viewed from Earth, smaller than a 1 mm-by-1 mm square of paper held 1 meter away, and equal to roughly one thirteen-millionth of the total area of the sky. The image is oriented so that the upper left corner points toward north (−46.4°) on the celestial sphere.
Can you just imagine how many galaxies are out there?  If that one small picture shows about 10,000 galaxies, can you just imagine the enormity of galaxies out there?  Unbelievable.  To put things in perspective - you take that 10,000 galaxies from that postage-stamp sized piece of the sky and multiply it by the number of postage-stamp-sized pieces of sky... we are talking hundreds of billions!  It's unfathomable!



Source:  wikipedia

0 WHAT IS THE LARGEST METEORITE FOUND ON EARTH?

In 1920, a farmer was plowing a field near Grootfontein, Namibia when his plow suddenly screeched to a halt. Curious about what he had run into he dug in the soil to find a large piece of metal. The large metal mass quickly attracted the attention of scientists and others, who identified it as a meteorite and removed the soil around it.

Although excavated, the meteorite has not been moved from its location of discovery because of its great weight. However, many pieces have been removed for scientific study and through vandalism.


Hoba

The Hoba Meteorite in 2006

The farmer had discovered a 66-ton iron meteorite - the largest single meteorite ever found and the largest piece of iron ever found near Earth's surface. It is tabular in shape and about nine feet long, nine feet wide (3 metres x 3 metres) and about three feet thick (0.91 metres). It was given the name "Hoba" because it was discovered on a farm named "Hoba West".

The Hoba meteorite is thought to have landed less than 80,000 years ago.  It is surprising that this meteorite is not surrounded by a crater. Objects of this size should punch through the atmosphere at a very high rate of speed and hit Earth with enough force to blast a significant crater. No crater is present around the site of the meteorite. This suggests that it fell to earth at a lower rate of speed than expected. 

It is inferred that the Earth's atmosphere slowed the object down to the point that it fell to the surface at terminal velocity, thereby remaining intact and causing little excavation. The meteorite is unusual in that it is flat on both major surfaces, possibly causing it to have skipped across the top of the atmosphere in the way a flat stone skips on water.

It is composed of about 84% iron, 16% nickel, and trace amounts of cobalt and other metals. An abundance of iron oxides in the soil around the meteorite suggests that it was much larger than 66 tons when it landed and has suffered significant losses from oxidation.

The Hoba Meteorite in 1967

In the attempt to control vandalism, the Government of Namibia (then South West Africa), declared the Hoba meteorite to be a National Monument on March 15, 1955 with permission of Mrs. O. Scheel who was the owner of the farm at that time.  In 1985, Rossing Uranium Ltd. made resources and funds available to the Namibian Government to provide additional protection against vandalism. In 1987 Mr. J. Engelbrecht, the owner of Hoba West farm, donated the meteorite and the site where it lies to the State for "educational" purposes. Later that year, the Government opened a tourist centre at the site. As a result of these developments, vandalism of the Hoba meteorite has ceased and it is now visited by thousands of tourists every year.







Resource(s):
geology.com
wikipedia

0 HOW DO ASTRONAUTS USE THE BATHROOM IN SPACE?

Well, the simple answer is:

Astronauts brush their teeth just like they do on Earth. There is no shower on the Shuttle, so astronauts must make do with sponge baths until they return home. Each Space Shuttle has a toilet that can be used by both men and women. Designed to be as much as possible like those on Earth, the units use flowing air instead of water to move waste through the system.

So really, what is this space toilet and how does it actually work?

A space toilet, or zero gravity toilet, is a toilet that can be used in a weightless environment. In the absence of weight the collection and retention of liquid and solid waste is directed by use of air flow. Since the air used to direct the waste is returned to the cabin, it is filtered beforehand to control odor and cleanse bacteria. In older systems, waste water is vented into space and any solids are compressed and stored for removal upon landing. More modern systems expose solid waste to vacuum to kill bacteria, which prevents odor problems and kills pathogens.

So, let's think about this for a moment...

When you go to bathroom on earth, you are relying on gravity.  Imagine if you were half-way done and somebody shut off gravity.. it would be a mess, to say the least, not to mention you'd be floating off the toilet!!

Therefore, when they designed the toilets for space, the first thing was that it had to have a seat belt to hold you down.
Then they decided to seperate 'solids' from 'liquids' since it's easier to store them better this way.
Then there's a tube that you pee into which has air pulled into the tube.  For the women it's like a little cup fit up against them and for the men it's like a funnel they pee into and it just goes into a sewage tank.

However, the solids that comes out of your body, well now, that's a different story! That's a harder problem to solve and it's important medically as well.  At least on earth, the solids would fall to the ground and eventually well, become compose at the very least, but in space, of course, solids would float around.  It would really make you sick if you re-ingest something that came out of your body (yuck!)... and they can't afford to be sick up there in space and all, so they had to design a toilet that instead of gravity pulling everything into the toilet, they would use air-flow - using air to pull everything down into the toilet. 

Sure it will feel a little bit 'windy' down there.. but what the hell - at least it will be pulling everything that comes out of your body and into the storage tank which exposes it to the vacuum of space.  So basically all that solid is 'freeze-dried' thereby killing any bacteria which means killing all odours as well.  Then they just store it!  Then when a whole bunch of it is stored up, they put it in a un-manned supply ship, undock it, and then it burns up in the atmosphere!

So, the next time you see a beautiful shooting star going across the sky... think again!




Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_toilet


Resource(s):
current.com, Col. Chris Hadfield, Canadian Space Agency,

0 HOW LONG WOULD IT TAKE FOR YOU TO DIE, IF YOU FELL OUT OF A SPACE SHIP - WITHOUT A SPACE SUIT?

2 mins!

Contrary to Hollywood, you wouldn’t explode. Lack of oxygen in the blood is what would kill you, but it would take about two minutes.
At most, an astronaut or person without a suit would last about 15 seconds before losing conciousness from lack of oxygen. (That's how long it would take the body to use up the oxygen left in the blood.)   After that?  You will die from asphyxiation or the effects of the pressure reduction.


Read on...
First of all, if you're thinking of holding your breath once outside that space ship - don't!  Holding your breath is not a good thing to do, according to NASA.  This will result in rupturing of the lungs, with almost certainly fatal results. There is a good reason that it is called "explosive" decompression.

On a space station orbiting Saturn, a man inside a punctured spacesuit swells to monstrous proportions and explodes - remember the movie 'Outland'?  On Mars, the eyes of a man exposed to the near-vacuum of the martian atmosphere, pop out of his head and dangle by their optic nerves on the sides of his face - remember 'Total Recall'?   Enroute to jupiter on the Discovery spacecraft, Astronaut Dave Bowman space walks for 15 seconds with no helmet, and in no apparent pain, succeeds in reentering the Discovery through an open hatch - remember '2001:A Space Odyssey'?  Fortunately, only in science fiction stories do humans ever come into direct contact with the vacuum of space, but these contacts are often portrayed as having horrific consequences.

So How Long Can a Human Live Unprotected in Space?  To experience the vacuum is to die, but not quite in the grisly manner portrayed in some of the movies above. The truth of the matter seems to be closer to what Stanley Kubrik had in mind in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

If you don't try to hold your breath, exposure to space for half a minute or so is unlikely to produce permanent injury. Holding your breath is likely to damage your lungs, something scuba divers have to watch out for when ascending, and you'll have eardrum trouble if your Eustachian tubes are badly plugged up, but theory predicts -- and animal experiments confirm -- that otherwise, exposure to vacuum causes no immediate injury. You do not explode. Your blood does not boil. You do not freeze. You do not instantly lose consciousness.

Various minor problems (sunburn, possibly "the bends", certainly some reversible, painless swelling of skin and underlying tissue) start after ten seconds or so. At some point you lose consciousness (roughly, after 15 seconds), from lack of oxygen. Injuries accumulate. After perhaps one or two minutes, you're dying. The limits are not really known.

You do not explode and your blood does not boil because of the containing effect of your skin and circulatory system. You do not instantly freeze because, although the space environment is typically very cold, heat does not transfer away from a body quickly. Loss of consciousness occurs only after the body has depleted the supply of oxygen in the blood. If your skin is exposed to direct sunlight without any protection from its intense ultraviolet radiation, you can get a very bad sunburn.

At NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center (now renamed Johnson Space Center) we had a test subject accidentally exposed to a near vacuum (less than 1 psi) in an incident involving a leaking space suit in a vacuum chamber back in '65. He remained conscious for about 14 seconds, which is about the time it takes for O2 deprived blood to go from the lungs to the brain. The suit probably did not reach a hard vacuum, and we began repressurizing the chamber within 15 seconds. The subject regained consciousness at around 15,000 feet equivalent altitude. The subject later reported that he could feel and hear the air leaking out, and his last conscious memory was of the water on his tongue beginning to boil.

Aviation Week and Space Technology (02/13/95) printed a letter by Leonard Gordon which reported another vacuum-packed anecdote:

"The experiment of exposing an unpressurized hand to near vacuum for a significant time while the pilot went about his business occurred in real life on Aug. 16, 1960. Joe Kittinger, during his ascent to 102,800 ft (19.5 miles) in an open gondola, lost pressurization of his right hand. He decided to continue the mission, and the hand became painful and useless as you would expect. However, once back to lower altitudes following his record-breaking parachute jump, the hand returned to normal." 

To Sum It All Up...
The human body can briefly survive the hard vacuum of space unprotected, despite contrary depictions in some popular science fiction. Human flesh expands to about twice its size in such conditions, giving the visual effect of a body builder rather than an overfilled balloon. Consciousness is retained for up to 15 seconds as the effects of oxygen starvation set in. You have roughly under 2 minutes after that for any chances of survival. 
No snap freeze effect occurs because all heat must be lost through thermal radiation or the evaporation of liquids - heat leaves the body very slowly in a vacuum, and the blood does not boil because it remains pressurized within the body. The greatest danger is in attempting to hold one's breath before exposure, as the subsequent explosive decompression can damage the lungs. These effects have been confirmed through various accidents (including in very high altitude conditions, outer space and training vacuum chambers).
Human skin does not need to be protected from vacuum and is gas-tight by itself. Instead it only needs to be mechanically compressed to retain its normal shape. This can be accomplished providing you have a tight-fitting elastic body suit and a helmet for containing breathing gases - in other words, a Space suit!  Good Luck!



Source(s):
wikipedia, http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970603.html, slate.com