10 Amazing Facts About Life, Planets, Stars, and the Universe:

As we all know, the human race lives on a small blue dot, orbiting a yellow-orange star, in a galaxy that we call the Milky Way. This galaxy is some 100,000 light years across, and our closest neighbor (Andromeda) is about 2.5 million light-years away. And while we have been all over the surface of the Earth, we have never visited our sun, have yet to trek across the vast distances of our galaxy, and we still have quite a ways to go before we make it to Andromeda. In fact, we haven"t even finished exploring our own small planet. Ultimately, there is a lot that we don"t know about the cosmos, but what we do know is pretty awesome.

Check out 10 amazing facts at:
http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/10-amazing-facts-about-life-planets-stars-and-the-universe/

Image via NASA

Life Beyond Earth: A Day on Triton (Neptune’s Largest Moon):

Today, I would like to talk to you about what it would be like to spend a day on Triton. You may be thinking, “But I didn’t even know what Triton was until I read the title of this post. Why the heck would I want to go there?” If you did ask that question, I am judging you now (kidding).

Seriously though, a better question is: Why wouldn’t you want to go to Triton? Triton has everything that a tourist could want: smooth volcanic plains, shallow pits left by violent impacts, and valleys formed by icy lava flows. So you could spend your day skating across the sheets of ice-covered nitrogen, trooping through some of the frozen vales, or sliding down the cosmic craters. Best of all? Triton is one of the only geologically active moons in our solar system. So you can top it all off with a trip to see some of the massive plumes that are spewed forth by the Tritonian geysers. And these beasts aren’t like some of the one-shot wonders we see on Earth. Triton’s geysers continually eject material, sometimes shooting their smoky clouds 5miles (8km) into the atmosphere for years on end.

Then there’s the view. The Earth revolves a comfortable 93 million miles (150million km) from the Sun. At Nearly 2.8 billion miles (4.5 billion km) from Sol, Triton is a great place to go if you want to get a different perspective.

Want to know more about Triton? See:
http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/life-beyond-earth-a-day-on-triton-neptunes-largest-moon/

Image source:
http://www.arcadiastreet.com/cgvistas/neptune_0120.htm