Portal maintenance status: (April 2019)
|
Introduction
Outer space (or simply space) is that space which lies beyond the Earth's atmosphere. Both interplanetary space and interstellar space contain ultra-low levels of particle densities, constituting a near-perfect vacuum of predominantly hydrogen and helium plasma, permeated by electromagnetic radiation, cosmic rays, neutrinos, magnetic fields and dust. The baseline temperature of interplanetary and interstellar outer space, as set by the background radiation from the Big Bang, is 2.7 kelvins (−270 °C; −455 °F). Outer space locations that have some atmosphere such as the surface of Mars have temperatures which may vary somewhat from the temperatures found in the near perfect vacuum that exists in interplanetary and interstellar outer space.
The plasma between galaxies is thought to account for about half of the baryonic (ordinary) matter in the universe, having a number density of less than one hydrogen atom per cubic metre and a kinetic temperature of millions of kelvins. Local concentrations of matter have condensed into stars and galaxies. Intergalactic space takes up most of the volume of the universe, but even galaxies and star systems consist almost entirely of empty space. Most of the remaining mass-energy in the observable universe is made up of an unknown form, dubbed dark matter and dark energy.
Outer space does not begin at a definite altitude above Earth's surface. The Kármán line, an altitude of 100 km (62 mi) above sea level, is conventionally used as the start of outer space in space treaties and for aerospace records keeping. Certain portions of the upper stratosphere and the mesosphere are sometimes referred to as "near space". The framework for international space law was established by the Outer Space Treaty, which entered into force on 10 October 1967. This treaty precludes any claims of national sovereignty and permits all states to freely explore outer space. Despite the drafting of UN resolutions for the peaceful uses of outer space, anti-satellite weapons have been tested in Earth orbit.
The concept that the space between the Earth and the Moon must be a vacuum was first proposed in the 17th century after scientists discovered that air pressure decreased with altitude. The immense scale of outer space was grasped in the 20th century when the distance to the Andromeda galaxy was first measured. Humans began the physical exploration of space later in the same century with the advent of high-altitude balloon flights. This was followed by crewed rocket flights and, then, crewed Earth orbit, first achieved by Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union in 1961. The economic cost of putting objects, including humans, into space is very high, limiting human spaceflight to low Earth orbit and the Moon. On the other hand, uncrewed spacecraft have reached all of the known planets in the Solar System. Outer space represents a challenging environment for human exploration because of the hazards of vacuum and radiation. Microgravity has a negative effect on human physiology that causes both muscle atrophy and bone loss. (Full article...)
Selected article
The Sun is the spectral type G2V yellow star at the center of the Solar System. The Earth and many other bodies (including other planets, asteroids, meteoroids, comets and dust) orbit the Sun, which accounts for more than 99% of the Solar System's mass. Different latitudes of the Sun rotate at different rates; a point on the equator takes 25 days, while a point at a pole takes 36 days. The resultant torsion upsets the Sun's very strong magnetic field to create an 11-year solar cycle of activity. Heat and light from the Sun have supported almost all life on Earth. Humans use sunlight to grow crops (see photosynthesis) and power solar cells. The Sun is a ball of plasma with a diameter of 1.392 million km (864,950 mi) and a mass of about 2.0×1030 kg, which is somewhat higher than that of an average star. About 74% of its mass is hydrogen, with 25% helium, and the rest made up of trace quantities of heavier elements. The Sun is about 4.6 billion years old, and is about halfway through its main sequence evolution, during which nuclear fusion reactions in its core fuse hydrogen into helium.
Selected picture
-
Image 1Credit: William Anders"Earthrise," the first occasion in which humans saw the Earth seemingly rising above the surface of the Moon, taken during the Apollo 8 mission on December 24, 1968. This view was seen by the crew at the beginning of its fourth orbit around the Moon, although the very first photograph taken was in black-and-white. Note that the Earth is in shadow here. A photo of a fully lit Earth would not be taken until the Apollo 17 mission.
-
Image 2Image credit: NASAA radar image of the surface of Venus, centered at 180 degrees east longitude. This composite image was created from mapping by the Magellan probe, supplemented by data gathered by the Pioneer orbiter, with simulated hues based on color images recorded by Venera 13 and 14. No probe has been able to survive more than a few hours on Venus's surface, which is completely obscured by clouds, because the atmospheric pressure is some 90 times that of the Earth's, and its surface temperature is around 450 °C (842 °F).
-
Image 3Mercury is the smallest and closest to the Sun of the eight planets in the Solar System. It has no known natural satellites. The planet is named after the Roman deity Mercury, the messenger to the gods.
-
Image 4The asteroid 433 Eros was named after the Greek god of love Eros. This S-type asteroid is the second-largest near-Earth asteroid. This image shows the view looking from one end of the asteroid across the gouge on its underside and toward the opposite end.
-
Image 5Image credit: SeavAn animated image showing the apparent retrograde motion of Mars in 2003 as seen from Earth. All the true planets appear to periodically switch direction as they cross the sky. Because Earth completes its orbit in a shorter period of time than the planets outside its orbit, we periodically overtake them, like a faster car on a multi-lane highway. When this occurs, the planet will first appear to stop its eastward drift, and then drift back toward the west. Then, as Earth swings past the planet in its orbit, it appears to resume its normal motion west to east.
-
Image 6The Sombrero Galaxy is a spiral galaxy in the Virgo constellation. It was discovered in the late 1700s. It is about 28 million light years away and is just faint enough to be invisible to the naked eye but easily visible with small telescopes. In our sky, it is about one-fifth the diameter of the full moon. M104 is moving away from Earth at about 1,000 kilometers per second.
-
Image 7Realistic-color mosaic of images of Jupiter's moon Europa taken by NASA's Jupiter orbiter Galileo in 1995 and 1998. This view of the moon's anti-Jovian hemisphere shows numerous lineae, linear features created via a tectonic process in which crustal plates of water ice floating on a subsurface ocean (kept warm by tidal flexing) shift in relative position. Reddish regions are areas where the ice has a higher mineral content. The north polar region is at right. (Geologic features are annotated in Commons.)
-
Image 8Photo: NASA/Crew of Expedition 22Space Shuttle Endeavour in a photograph taken from the International Space Station, in which the shuttle appears to straddle the stratosphere and mesosphere. During this mission, STS-130, the shuttle's primary payloads were the Tranquility module and the Cupola, a robotic control station which provides a 360-degree view around the station.
-
Image 9NGC 6357 is a diffuse nebula in the constellation Scorpius. This composite image of the nebula contains X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the ROSAT telescope (purple), infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope (orange), and optical data from the SuperCosmos Sky Survey (blue). Radiation from hot, young stars is energizing the cooler gas in the clouds that surround them. Often known as the Lobster Nebula, the astronomical object has also been termed the Madokami Nebula by fans of the anime Madoka Magica due to its supposed resemblance to the main character. Scientists at the Midcourse Space Experiment prefer the name War and Peace Nebula, because the bright, western part resembles a dove, while the eastern part looks like a skull in infrared images.
-
Image 10Photograph: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of ArizonaThe Helix Nebula is a large planetary nebula located in the constellation Aquarius. Discovered by Karl Ludwig Harding, probably before 1824, it is one of the closest to Earth of all the bright planetary nebulae, about 215 parsecs (700 light-years) away. It is similar in appearance to the Cat's Eye Nebula and the Ring Nebula.
-
Image 11Photograph: Ken CrawfordNGC 4565 (also known as the Needle Galaxy) is an edge-on spiral galaxy about 30 to 50 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. NGC 4565 is a giant spiral galaxy more luminous than the Andromeda Galaxy, and has a population of roughly 240 globular clusters, more than the Milky Way.
-
Image 12Pale Blue Dot is the name given to this 1990 photo of Earth taken from Voyager 1 when its vantage point reached the edge of the Solar System, a distance of roughly 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometres). Earth can be seen as a blueish-white speck approximately halfway down the brown band to the right. The light band over Earth is an artifact of sunlight scattering in the camera's lens, resulting from the small angle between Earth and the Sun. Carl Sagan came up with the idea of turning the spacecraft around to take a composite image of the Solar System. Six years later, he reflected, "All of human history has happened on that tiny pixel, which is our only home."
-
Image 13Image: Tom RuenAn animation of the phases of the Moon. As the Moon revolves around the Earth, the Sun lights the Moon from a different side, creating the different phases. In the image, the Moon appears to get bigger as well as "wobble" slightly. Tidal locking synchronizes the Moon's rotation period on its axis to match its orbital period around the earth. These two periods nearly cancel each other out, except that the Moon's orbit is elliptical. This causes its orbital motion to speed up when closer to the Earth, and slow down when farther away, causing the Moon's apparent diameter to change, as well as the wobbling motion observed.
-
Image 14Photo: Yuri Beletsky, ESOA laser shoots towards the centre of the Milky Way from the Very Large Telescope facility in Chile, to provide a laser guide star, a reference point in the sky for the telescope's adaptive optics (AO) system. AO technology improves the performance of optical systems by reducing the effect of atmospheric distortion. AO was first envisioned by Horace W. Babcock in 1953, but did not come into common usage until advances in computer technology during the 1990s made the technique practical.
-
Image 15Credit: NASAThis Supernova remnant of Kepler's Supernova (SN 1604) is made up of the materials left behind by the gigantic explosion of a star. There are two possible routes to this end: either a massive star may cease to generate fusion energy in its core, and collapse inward under the force of its own gravity, or a white dwarf star may accumulate material from a companion star until it reaches a critical mass and undergoes a similar collapse. In either case, the resulting supernova explosion expels much or all of the stellar material with great force.
-
Image 16Photo credit: Mars Reconnaissance OrbiterFalse-color Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image of a side of the Chasma Boreale, a canyon in the polar ice cap of the Planum Boreum (north pole of Mars). Light browns are layers of surface dust, greys and blues are layers of water and carbon dioxide ice. Regular geometric cracking is indicative of higher concentrations of water ice.
The Planum Boreum's permanent ice cap has a maximum depth of 3 km (1.9 mi). It is roughly 1200 km (750 mi) in diameter, an area equivalent to about 1½ times the size of Texas. The Chasma Boreale is up to 100 km (62.5 mi) wide and features scarps up to 2 km (1.25 mi) high. For a comparison, the Grand Canyon is approximately 1.6 km (1 mi) deep in some places and 446 km (279 mi) long but only up to 24 km (15 mi) wide. -
Image 17Animation credit: CmgleeThis is an animation showing geocentric satellite orbits, to scale with the Earth, at 3,600 times actual speed. The second-outermost (shown in grey) is a geostationary orbit, 35,786 kilometres (22,236 miles) above Earth's equator and following the direction of Earth's rotation, with an orbital period matching the planet's rotation period (a geosynchronous orbit). An object in such an orbit will appear to occupy a fixed position in the sky. Some 300 kilometres (190 miles) farther away is the graveyard orbit (brown), used for satellites at the end of their operational lives. Nearer to the Earth are the orbits of navigational satellites, such as Galileo (turquoise), BeiDou (beige), GPS (blue) and GLONASS (red), in medium Earth orbits. Much closer to the planet, and within the inner Van Allen belt, are satellites in low Earth orbit, such as the Iridium satellite constellation (purple), the Hubble Space Telescope (green) and the International Space Station (magenta).
-
Image 18The Pioneer plaque, which was included on both Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 unmanned spacecraft, the first man-made objects to leave the Solar System. Made from gold-anodised aluminium, the plaque shows the figures of a man and a woman along with several symbols that are designed to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft. However, the mean time for the spacecraft to come within 30 astronomical units of a star is longer than the current age of our galaxy.
-
Image 19A timed exposure of the first Space Shuttle mission, STS-1. The shuttle Columbia stands on launch pad A at Kennedy Space Center, the night before launch. The objectives of the maiden flight were to check out the overall Shuttle system, accomplish a safe ascent into orbit and to return to Earth for a safe landing.
-
Image 20A TRACE image of sunspots on the surface, or photosphere, of the sun from September 2002, is taken in the far ultraviolet on a relatively quiet day for solar activity. However, the image still shows a large sunspot group visible as a bright area near the horizon. Although sunspots are relatively cool regions on the surface of the sun, the bright glowing gas flowing around the sunspots have a temperature of over one million °C (1.8 million °F). The high temperatures are thought to be related to the rapidly changing magnetic field loops that channel solar plasma.
-
Image 21NASA astronaut Robert Curbeam (left) and European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Christer Fuglesang participate in STS-116's first of three planned sessions of extra-vehicular activity (EVA) as construction resumes on the International Space Station. The landmasses depicted in the background are the South Island (left) and North Island (right) of New Zealand.
-
Image 22Credit: NASA, ESA, AURA/Caltech, Palomar ObservatoryThe Pleiades (also known as M45 or the Seven Sisters) is an open cluster in the constellation of Taurus. It is among the nearest to the Earth of all open clusters, probably the best known and certainly the most striking to the naked eye.
Space-related portals
General images
-
Image 1Spent upper stage of a Delta II rocket, photographed by the XSS 10 satellite (from Space debris)
-
Image 3Spatial density of space debris by altitude according to ESA MASTER-2001, without debris from the Chinese ASAT and 2009 collision events (from Space debris)
-
Image 5Model of Vostok spacecraft (from Space exploration)
-
Image 6Space Shuttle Endeavour had a major impact on its radiator during STS-118. The entry hole is about 5.5 mm (0.22 in), and the exit hole is twice as large. (from Space debris)
-
Image 7For the first time, the NASA / ESA / Canadian Space Agency / James Webb Space Telescope has observed the chemical signature of carbon-rich dust grains at redshift, which is roughly equivalent to one billion years after the birth of the Universe, this observation suggests exciting avenues of investigation into both the production of cosmic dust and the earliest stellar populations in our Universe. (from Cosmic dust)
-
Image 9Concept art for a NASA Vision mission (from Space exploration)
-
Image 10Artistic image of a rocket lifting from a Saturn moon (from Space exploration)
-
Image 11Atmospheric attenuation in dB/km as a function of frequency over the EHF band. Peaks in absorption at specific frequencies are a problem, due to atmosphere constituents such as water vapor (H2O) and carbon dioxide (CO2). (from Interstellar medium)
-
Image 12Known orbit planes of Fengyun-1C debris one month after the weather satellite's disintegration by the Chinese ASAT (from Space debris)
-
Image 13Cosmic dust of the Andromeda Galaxy as revealed in infrared light by the Spitzer Space Telescope. (from Cosmic dust)
-
Image 14Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to image the warm dust around a nearby young star, Fomalhaut, in order to study the first asteroid belt ever seen outside of the Solar System in infrared light. (from Cosmic dust)
-
Image 16A computer-generated map of objects orbiting Earth, as of 2005. About 95% are debris, not working artificial satellites (from Outer space)
-
Image 17A laser-guided observation of the Milky Way Galaxy at the Paranal Observatory in Chile in 2010 (from Outline of space science)
-
Image 18Smooth chondrite interplanetary dust particle. (from Cosmic dust)
-
Image 19Debris density in low Earth orbit (from Space debris)
-
Image 20Major elements of 200 stratospheric interplanetary dust particles. (from Cosmic dust)
-
Image 21A wide field view of outer space as seen from Earth's surface at night. The interplanetary dust cloud is visible as the horizontal band of zodiacal light, including the false dawn (edges) and gegenschein (center), which is visually crossed by the Milky Way (from Outer space)
-
Image 23Vanguard 1 is expected to remain in orbit for 240 years. (from Space debris)
-
Image 24This light-year-long knot of interstellar gas and dust resembles a caterpillar. (from Interstellar medium)
-
Image 25Artist's impression of dust formation around a supernova explosion. (from Cosmic dust)
-
Image 26First television image of Earth from space, taken by TIROS-1 (1960) (from Space exploration)
-
Image 27Illustration of Earth's atmosphere gradual transition into outer space (from Outer space)
-
Image 28Concept for a space-based solar power system to beam energy down to Earth (from Outer space)
-
Image 30Near-Earth space showing the low-Earth (blue), medium Earth (green), and high Earth (red) orbits. The last extends beyond the radius of geosynchronous orbits (from Outer space)
-
Image 31The diversity found in the different types and scales of astronomical objects make the field of study increasingly specialized. (from Outline of space science)
-
Image 32Map showing the Sun located near the edge of the Local Interstellar Cloud and Alpha Centauri about 4 light-years away in the neighboring G-Cloud complex (from Interstellar medium)
-
Image 33Astronaut Piers Sellers during the third spacewalk of STS-121, a demonstration of orbiter heat shield repair techniques (from Outline of space science)
-
Image 34Debris impacts on Mir's solar panels degraded their performance. The damage is most noticeable on the panel on the right, which is facing the camera with a high degree of contrast. Extensive damage to the smaller panel below is due to impact with a Progress spacecraft. (from Space debris)
-
Image 36Apollo 16 LEM Orion, the Lunar Roving Vehicle and astronaut John Young (1972) (from Space exploration)
-
Image 37Infographic showing the space debris situation in different kinds of orbits around Earth (from Space debris)
-
Image 38Apollo CSM in lunar orbit (from Space exploration)
-
Image 39The distribution of ionized hydrogen (known by astronomers as H II from old spectroscopic terminology) in the parts of the Galactic interstellar medium visible from the Earth's northern hemisphere as observed with the Wisconsin Hα Mapper (Haffner et al. 2003) harv error: no target: CITEREFHaffnerReynoldsTufteMadsen2003 (help). (from Interstellar medium)
-
Image 40Voyager 1 is the first artificial object to reach the interstellar medium. (from Interstellar medium)
-
Image 41A proposed timeline of the origin of space, from physical cosmology (from Outline of space science)
-
Image 43Objects in Earth orbit including fragmentation debris, November 2020, NASA: ODPO (from Space debris)
-
Image 47The International Space Station is an orbiting laboratory for space applications and habitability. Visible in the background is yellow-green airglow of Earth's ionosphere and the interstellar field of the Milky Way. (from Outer space)
-
Image 48Buzz Aldrin taking a core sample of the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission (from Space exploration)
-
Image 49Gabbard diagram of almost 300 pieces of debris from the disintegration of the five-month-old third stage of the Chinese Long March 4 booster on 11 March 2000 (from Space debris)
-
Image 50A micrometeoroid left this crater on the surface of Space Shuttle Challenger's front window on STS-7. (from Space debris)
-
Image 51Earth and the Moon as seen from cislunar space on the 2022 Artemis 1 mission (from Outer space)
-
Image 52Spatial density of LEO space debris by altitude, according to 2011 a NASA report to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (from Space debris)
-
Image 53Conventional anti-satellite weapons such as the SM-3 missile remain legal under space law, even though they create hazardous space debris (from Outer space)
-
Image 54A MESSENGER image from 18,000 km showing a region about 500 km across (2008) (from Space exploration)
-
Image 55Growth of tracked objects in orbit and related events; efforts to manage outer space global commons have so far not reduced the debris or the growth of objects in orbit (from Space debris)
-
Image 57Because of the hazards of a vacuum, astronauts must wear a pressurized space suit while outside their spacecraft.
-
Image 58Saudi officials inspect a crashed PAM-D module in January 2001. (from Space debris)
-
Image 59Perseverance's backshell sitting upright on the surface of Jezero Crater (from Space debris)
-
Image 60Astronaut Buzz Aldrin had a personal Communion service when he first arrived on the surface of the Moon. (from Space exploration)
-
Image 62Reconstruction of solar activity over 11,400 years. Period of equally high activity over 8,000 years ago marked. (from Space climate)
-
Image 63Cosmic dust of the Horsehead Nebula as revealed by the Hubble Space Telescope. (from Cosmic dust)
-
Image 65Bow shock formed by the magnetosphere of the young star LL Orionis (center) as it collides with the Orion Nebula flow
-
Image 67Large-scale matter distribution in a cubic section of the universe. The blue fiber-like structures represent the matter, and the empty regions in between represent the cosmic voids of the intergalactic medium (from Outer space)
-
Image 68The sparse plasma (blue) and dust (white) in the tail of comet Hale–Bopp are being shaped by pressure from solar radiation and the solar wind, respectively.
-
Image 69The original Magdeburg hemispheres (left) used to demonstrate Otto von Guericke's vacuum pump (right)
-
Image 70A dusty trail from the early Solar System to carbonaceous dust today. (from Cosmic dust)
-
Image 71Timeline of the expansion of the universe, where visible space is represented by the circular sections. At left, a dramatic expansion occurs in the inflationary epoch, and at the center, the expansion accelerates. Neither time nor size are to scale. (from Outer space)
-
Image 72The Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF) is an important source of information on small-particle space debris. (from Space debris)
Did you know (auto-generated)
- ... that, for the Space 220 Restaurant, Disney reached out to NASA engineers to understand what a space elevator might look like?
- ... that some severe environmental impacts of the invasion of Ukraine can be seen from space?
- ... that the space industry of India has supported the launch of more than 100 domestic satellites and more than 300 foreign satellites?
- ... that Nature's Fynd, producer of microbe-based meat substitutes, is working with NASA to develop a bioreactor for use in space travel?
- ... that Louis W. Roberts was among the highest ranking African-American space program staff at NASA while the Apollo program was underway?
Space news
2024 in space | ||
---|---|---|
Space probe launches |
| |
Impact events | ||
Selected NEOs | ||
Discoveries | ||
Comets | ||
Upcoming spaceflight launches
For a full schedule of launches and deep-space rendezvous, see 2024 in spaceflight.
|
Astronomical events
Topics
Biology |
| |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Environment | ||||||
Society | ||||||
Technology |
| |||||
2020 in space | ||
---|---|---|
Space probe launches |
| |
Impact events | ||
Selected NEOs |
| |
Exoplanets |
| |
Discoveries |
| |
Comets | ||
Space exploration |
| |
2019 in space | ||
---|---|---|
Space probe launches |
| |
Impact events |
| |
Selected NEOs | ||
Exoplanets |
| |
Discoveries |
| |
Comets | ||
Space exploration |
| |
2018 in space | ||
---|---|---|
Space probe launches |
| |
Impact events | ||
Selected NEOs | ||
Exoplanets | ||
Discoveries |
| |
Novae |
| |
Comets | ||
Space exploration |
| |
2017 in space | ||
---|---|---|
Space probe launches |
| |
Impact events | ||
Selected NEOs | ||
Exoplanets | ||
Discoveries | ||
Comets | ||
Space exploration |
| |
2016 in space | ||
---|---|---|
Space probe launches |
| |
Impact events | ||
Selected NEOs | ||
Exoplanets |
| |
Discoveries |
| |
Novae | ||
Comets | ||
Space exploration | ||
2015 in space | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Space probe launches |
| |||||
Impact events | ||||||
Selected NEOs | ||||||
Exoplanets |
| |||||
Discoveries |
| |||||
Comets | ||||||
Space exploration | ||||||
Categories
Wikimedia
The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject:
-
Commons
Free media repository -
Wikibooks
Free textbooks and manuals -
Wikidata
Free knowledge base -
Wikinews
Free-content news -
Wikiquote
Collection of quotations -
Wikisource
Free-content library -
Wikiversity
Free learning tools -
Wiktionary
Dictionary and thesaurus