Ridiculous question from the internet: What were Louie Armstrong’s first words when he stepped foot on the moon?

Source of said ridiculous question: Yahoo Answers

Science’s answer: Louis Armstrong (the musician) never made it to the moon. He was already 68 when Neil Armstrong (the astronaut) stepped onto the moon and said “that’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” There is some controversy about whether Armstrong included the correct indefinite article “a” before the word “man,” but frankly it’s an awesome quote either way. Had Louis Armstrong made it to the moon, we assume he would have played something jazzy on his trumpet.

Ridiculous question from the internet: Could a bird fly in space?

Source of said ridiculous question: Google Autofill

Science’s answer: No. Nor can it fly on mars or the moon. The reason? There is no atmosphere. This means two things: First, the birds wings won’t work, since the lack of atmosphere does not allow them to produce lift. Second, the cold, oxygen-less vacuum of space is not a place a bird can survive – they would quickly asphyxiate. That is, unless you could put the bird into a space suit. Then it could survive, but the suit would have to cover its whole body, so it still couldn’t “fly”. That wouldn’t be a problem though, since it could just float around like a boss.

Ridiculous question from the internet: Is the moon a planet, a moon or a star??

Source of said ridiculous question: Yahoo Answers

Science’s answer: I think you answered your own question already. A star is a luminous sphere of plasma held together by gravity. Plasma is a fourth state of matter (after gas, liquid, and solid) that consists of hot ionized gas. Our sun is a star. A planet is a large object that orbits a star. The orbit needs to be regular and it needs to have cleared the debris (other space bodies created around the same time as the planet) from around its orbit. Pluto was recently demoted to “dwarf planet” because there was too much of this debris around it’s orbit. A moon orbits a planet, and planets can have multiple moons. Jupiter has 63 moons! The Earth only has one moon, and we call it “the moon”.

Ridiculous question from the internet: How do astronauts pee or poop in space?

Source of said ridiculous question: Google autofill

Science’s answer: Real mature. This was actually a pretty big issue in the early days of the space program, because without gravity, pee (and especially poop) doesn’t separate from the body without help. Today, there are space toilets, which use a suction system to pull the waste away from the body. Here’s a whole story on the history of going to the bathroom in space. You’ll be interested to know that the poop is expelled into space, and enters the Earth’s atmosphere – but don’t worry, it burns up on reentry.

Ridiculous question from the internet: How do we know if the sun is hot if we’ve never touched it???

Source of said ridiculous question: Yahoo Answers

Science’s answer: This actually an interesting question. In general, we don’t tell temperatures by touching things, but we do usually need to get a thermometer there to get a reading. So how do we know how hot the sun is?

For the surface of the sun, scientists use the spectrum of light it emits. The light emitted at each wavelength of the spectrum can tell us the temperature of the source of the light. From this, we know the surface of the sun is 5,880 °K, which is 5,605 °C, or 10,124 °F. That’s really hot. Scientists can’t use the same method to determine the temperature in the core of the sun, but we do know it needs to be hot enough to fuse hydrogen atoms into helium atoms (since that is what powers the sun), which means it’s around 15,710,000 °K. That’s over 15 million °C or 28 million °F. That’s REALLY hot!!