Photo- Arches Star Cluster

Here is the photo of the day from NASA's website's photo of the day.

Earth

Well, here we are, Earth, we've travelled 150,000,000 (150 million) and 2 posts to get here-Home!
This is going to be a two part (possibly three) part series about Earth.

The time it takes for one  Earth day (just pretend your martians, I know you know this) is actually 23 hours 57 minutes, but we round it up (I never knew that, did you!?)

One year is 365 days and a quarter, so every four years, so we have a leap year to make up for the quarters.

Basic interesting facts

Picture of Earth
from NASA.

• The Earth has one moon

• Someday the moon will fly off into deep space as the gravitational pull of Earth will loose it's grip.

• The Earth's surface is two thirds water, but compared with the whole inside of the Earth it only covers a measly 0.0002 of Earth's mass.

• Earth is not the only planet that had or has water, Mars used to have water too, but I'll explain that when I get to the Mars section.

OK, well goodbye peeps ;)

Photo-Andromeda

From now on, I'm going to post photos of things I find extraordinary about space and post them.

Beautiful or what

Venus

It's solar system time again!
Today it is Venus, the second closest and the hottest of all the planets. Venus is 108 million miles away from the sun, consequently making it take 225 Earth days to orbit around the sun and 243 days for one day. (And you thought Mercury was bad!)

The name Venus is from the Roman Goddess, Venus, Goddess of love. Venus's temperature is an average of 460 degrees, day or night. Why?  Because Venus has a lot of clouds in it's atmosphere full of greenhouse gasses, making it trap in heat.

Venus's surface is very rocky and full of volcanoes and magma streams. Lightning is not a rare thing on Venus, in fact, lightning on Venus can strike thousands of times a second! In fact, two probes have been sent to land on Venus's surface. None returned.

A mapped version of Venus's surface.

Interesting facts

• Venus is also known is the morning star, being found always in the east of the sky (in the northern hemisphere) around four to six in the morning.
• It is also known as the Evening star as well!
• Venus's atmosphere is 98% Carbon Dioxide.
• The Atmospheric pressure of Venus compared to Earth is 90 times more. 
• Earth has a mass only 0.18 times than Venus.
• Venus has no moons 

Good Bye everyone!

Mercury

OK, well first of all, sorry everyone I completely forgot about this Blog and now there's nothing new to read, I apologise greatly for this (Maybe I shouldn't have put the title as Universe "Daily!")

Anyway, so back to our solar system section of items- Mercury (Not to be confused with the poisonous liquid or the Greek messenger.)The planet's name was named after the Greek  messenger Mercury (based on some Greek Myths), who delivered messages to mortals and gods alike. Mercury is the planet closest to the sun, at approximately 58 million miles away from the sun.This planet only takes 88 Earth days to orbit the sun. However, one day on mercury is 59 Earth days, so there's only one and a bit days in a Mercury year.

So, you may think that because Mercury is the closest to our sun, that it is warm all the time. Wrong. Mercury can actually drop in temperature to a whopping -180 Celsius, colder than the Earth could ever reach! In the day, mercury can reach a metal melting, 400 Celsius!

A photo of Mercury taken from the
messenger probe.

Interesting Facts

• Mercury is a rocky planet in the inner zone of the solar system (The first four planets or before the asteroid belt.) 
• It has no moons and no atmosphere, nor an active core.
• Astronomers found that the surface of Mercury was thicker a few million years ago, but evidence has shown that there was a huge collision with a planet that did not survive the creation of the our solar system.
• The mass of Mercury compared to Earth is 0.06 ( 1 60th.)

Well that's it for today and hopefully I'll be updating more, good bye, my fellow readers.

Dark Flow & Dark Fluid

New to the astronomy universe, dark flow is something to do with the velocity of galaxies. This is very ambiguous, but dark flow was only found out four years ago. Basically, the velocity is the velocity predicted by the sum in Hubble's law.

Dark Fluid is the most unclear force to scientists. Not much is known about it and I find it VERY hard to understand, probably due to my lack of knowledge in equations, but if you want to find out about dark fluid and dark flow (as this is the most ambiguous subject to me) then click this link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fluid and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_flow

Dark Energy

Opposite in it's effects to dark matter, dark energy pushes things apart while dark matter pushes things together. Dark energy is predominant in the universe. About 70% is dark energy, 29% is dark matter and 1% is cosmic dust. Dark energy is what is causing the expansion of our universe, and as dark energy "wins" the battle against dark matter, the expansion will become so fast, the universe could end in the big rip, where everything rips apart, even atoms. But don't worry, that won't happen for another ten trillion years.

Anti-Matter

Continuing on the atoms topic, I will be talking about Anti-matter, the opposite of matter. To the untrained eye, anti -matter will look like normal matter, but there are slight differences such as the electric charges which are opposite. So, the proton is negative, the electron is positive (known as a positron) and the nucleus and the neutron have no charge. Anti-matter and matter will obliterate each other on collision.
In recent science, scientists have the ability to make anti- matter in huge machinery and in even more recent science, scientists have captured anti -matter for fifteen minutes, which allowed for deeper understanding of this mysterious type of particle.