Facts that sound false but are true — Page 9
Our highest surprise rating: the facts people most often refuse to believe until they read the explanation. Every one of them is documented.
627 facts
Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter, is larger than the planet Mercury.
At 5,268 km across, Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System, compared with Mercury's 4,879 km. Even so, it…
Titan, a moon of Saturn, is the only moon in the Solar System with a thick atmosphere.
Titan's atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, like Earth's, and the pressure at the surface is about one and a half times…
The Voyager 1 probe, launched in 1977, is the human-made object farthest from Earth.
In 2012 it left the bubble of solar wind surrounding the planets and entered interstellar space. It is more than 24…
The Andromeda galaxy, 2.5 million light-years away, is the most distant object easily seen with the naked eye.
Under a dark sky it appears as a faint, elongated smudge. The light we see left it about 2.5 million years ago, when…
A comet's tail always points away from the Sun, even when the comet is moving away from it.
The tail is not a trail left behind by motion: it is gas and dust pushed by the solar wind and the pressure of…
The Earth is closest to the Sun in early January, in the middle of the northern hemisphere's winter.
At that point the Earth is about 147 million km from the Sun; in early July it is about 152 million km away. The…
Mercury has a tail of sodium atoms millions of kilometres long, similar to a comet's.
Sunlight and micrometeorite impacts knock sodium atoms off the surface, and the pressure of sunlight pushes them…
Phobos, Mars's largest moon, gets closer to the planet every year and will eventually be torn apart.
Phobos orbits so close to Mars that gravity is slowly braking it: it drops about 1.8 metres per century. In 30 to 50…
By solving reCAPTCHA tests, millions of people unknowingly helped to digitise old books and newspapers.
Created in 2007 at Carnegie Mellon University, reCAPTCHA showed one known word and another that computers had failed…
Nokia started out in 1865 as a paper pulp mill in Finland.
The engineer Fredrik Idestam opened the mill by a river, and the name came from the town of Nokia, where it later…
Samsung was founded in 1938 as a small company selling dried fish, vegetables and noodles.
Lee Byung-chul opened the business in Daegu, Korea, with about 40 employees, exporting goods to China. The name means…
On a very hot pan, water drops skate around and last longer than on a pan that is merely hot.
This is the Leidenfrost effect, described in 1756. Above about 200 °C, the underside of the drop evaporates instantly…
Aluminium was once more valuable than gold, and the tip of the Washington Monument is an aluminium pyramid.
Although it is the most abundant metal in Earth's crust, it was extremely hard to extract from ores. In 1884 the…
The first X-ray image, made by Wilhelm Röntgen in 1895, showed his wife's hand, wedding ring and all.
Röntgen discovered an invisible type of radiation that passed through skin but was stopped by bones and metal. He…
For geologists, ice is a mineral, and a glacier is technically a rock.
A mineral is a natural, inorganic solid with a crystal structure and a defined chemical composition, and ice meets…
'Photo 51', taken in Rosalind Franklin's laboratory, was crucial to discovering the structure of DNA.
The image, made with X-rays in 1952 by the student Raymond Gosling under Franklin's supervision, showed an X-shaped…
Copper surfaces kill bacteria and viruses within a few hours.
Copper ions damage the membranes and genetic material of microbes. In 2020 a study showed that the new coronavirus…
Helium was discovered in the Sun in 1868, almost 30 years before it was found on Earth.
During an eclipse, astronomers saw a yellow line in sunlight that no known element could explain. Norman Lockyer…
The goblin shark can project its jaw out of its mouth to catch prey.
The goblin shark's jaw is held by elastic ligaments that allow it to be launched forward at very high speed. This…
Lake Vostok is located under two kilometers of ice in Antarctica.
Lake Vostok is located under about four kilometers of ice, not two. It is one of the largest subglacial lakes in the…
Piltdown Man was one of the greatest scientific frauds in history.
In 1912, skull and jaw fragments were presented as a missing link between humans and apes. In 1953, it was discovered…
A vacuum can change the way light travels when subjected to extreme magnetic fields.
An international team used observations of a magnetar, a neutron star with a magnetic field billions of times…
Venus has a day longer than its year.
Venus takes about 243 Earth days to complete one rotation on its axis, but only about 225 Earth days to orbit the…
Physicists created the world's smallest QR code, measuring just 50 by 50 nanometers.
Using a scanning tunneling microscope, researchers positioned silver atoms one by one to form a QR code that is more…
