Interesting Facts about Space

by Emily R. Austin

I do a lot of online dating though, and I rarely ever meet in public. That safety protocol is more applicable to straight women. One of the perks of being a lesbian is that it is less critical for me to vet whether my date will kill me.

I hate being startled. I prefer controlled forms of fear. I like my podcasts, horror movies, and ghost stories that I can pause and rewind. I handle fear sort of like a warhorse. I could charge bravely into a planned battle, take in the sights of bombs and corpses, but I would still be spooked by an unanticipated barn rat.

“There’s a great red spot on Jupiter,”

“It’s an enormous storm,” I explain. “It’s a vortex big enough to engulf Earth. It’s been raging for centuries. There are records of it being seen over three hundred and fifty years ago. On Earth, hurricanes slow down when they reach solid land, but there is no solid surface on Jupiter.”

What’s Jupiter made of?” “Mostly hydrogen and helium. It’s a cloud.”

“That’s hard to say. It shrinks and grows. Sometimes it changes color. It gets intensely red. It might go away someday, but yes. It could last as long as the planet.”

“Did you know light travels 186,000 miles a second?”

The moon is 238,855 miles away, so it takes 1.3 seconds for light to travel from it to us. That means when we look at the moon, we don’t really see it as it is. We see it as it was 1.3 seconds ago.”

“Well, space is how we could see back in time. If we could travel faster than light, and if Earth gave off enough of it, and we had some innovative telescope, that is how we could see our past. We could look back and see the dinosaurs. We could watch the meteor hit.”

I tap until I find my mom’s name. When I think of her, rather than call her or text her a message that says something like, Hey, I’m thinking of you, I tell her interesting facts about space. I text her, Hey mom, did you know sunsets on Mars are blue?

“I am an information architect,” I say. When I tell people I work for the Space Agency, they usually assume I’m an astronaut or an engineer. My job has much less to do with astrophysics than it does with organizing information. I got my master’s degree in information science. I keep track of interesting facts to tell my mom, but I’m not an astrophysicist.

Sometimes, when things are broken, I find they fix themselves if you just pretend that they are fine and give them time.

I have been struggling lately with an irrational fear of bald men. It is possible that I am reliving my ghost problem. Maybe I’m imagining bald faces the way I imagined that ghost because I’ve been fixating on bald men, and my brain likes torturing me. Maybe this is all some complicated form of psychological self-harm. The meat in my skull wants me to suffer. Maybe I deserve to suffer.

Did you know ‘spaghettification’ is a legitimate term in astrophysics?”

“It’s when objects are stretched when they contend with differences in gravitational forces, like black holes.”

There is so much space in galaxies. Most of space is empty. When galaxies collide, it’s unlikely for stars to crash into each other even though they’re colossal. Collisions tend not to result in any planets or stars touching. The space between stars, the gas and dust, collides and creates new stars, and there are shock waves, but objects are unlikely to crash.

Hey mom, just letting you know Jupiter has sixty-seven moons.

If Jupiter disappeared, Earth would be hit by more asteroids. Jupiter’s gravitational pull grabs a lot of space trash heading toward us.

“Aphids don’t need mates,” the narrator tells us. “They clone themselves. And their babies are born pregnant. All aphids are female. They give birth to both their daughters and their granddaughters. That’s why you only need one aphid to infest your garden.”

“Enid, I am diagnosing you with post-traumatic stress disorder. You also show traits of being neurologically atypical.

“So PTSD is a condition that occurs due to experiencing a traumatic event or a series of events that make you feel hopeless, trapped, or scared. It manifests differently in people. I believe your experience with it is also impacted by the way you process and learn.”

“Dissociation is one PTSD symptom I’ve noted you have. You mentioned nightmares, depersonalizing, brain fog. Hyperarousal is another symptom I see in you. You interpret situations as unsafe due to increased vigilance.

I spent a lot of time growing up trying to seem normal. Sometimes I worry I neglected doing the internal work most people do while they’re developing; I was too preoccupied camouflaging. I think I might be stunted because of it. I think I missed a step.

A meteorite will hit a person once every 180 years. That means the next time somebody will be hit is 2134, though of course, who knows?

An asteroid almost hit Earth in 2021. It went undetected because it came from a blind spot, where the sun is in our eyes.

I’d prefer the ones about how sunsets on Mars are blue, or how it rains diamonds on Jupiter.”