Humanity has built enough roads to cover the distance from the earth to the moon over 80 times*.

* This value will change - Wolfram|Alpha calculates the moon’s current distance from the Earth, which varies as it moves through its monthly orbit. 

Sagittarius A* is believed to be the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy.

The next time you go stargazing, bring the power of computation along with the Wolfram Planets Reference App and Wolfram Stars Reference App for iOS. Both apps provide access to real-time data and the computational power of Wolfram|Alpha in order to perform advanced calculations and provide data on the planets and stars.

Exploring all of the planets in our solar system is easy with the Wolfram Planets Reference App. Using real-time data on the eight major planets, as well as dwarf planets and minor planets, the app can: compute a planet’s orbital properties, including orbital period and distance from the Earth and Sun; provide physical properties like radius, rotation period, and number of moons; and show information about a planet’s atmosphere, including atmospheric pressure, average temperature, and major constituents.

It’s impossible to count all of the stars, but with the Wolfram Stars Reference App, you’ll have access to real-time data on over 100,000 of them. For easy browsing, stars are sorted into groups such as the Northern or Southern Sky stars; brightest stars; nearest stars; and giant, supergiant, and main sequence stars. The app also allows you to enter any star name to get information and to examine and compare properties for each star, such as its magnitude, spectral class, temperature, mass, lifetime, and distance from Earth.

Learn more on our blog.

A satellite NASA has been watching closely, UARS, is the size of a bus and is going to fall out of the sky. UARS, which has been orbiting Earth since 1991 is decaying, and NASA says that this satellite will re-enter the atmosphere in an uncontrolled fashion most likely sometime on Friday. Due to the large size of the satellite, some pieces are expected to survive re-entry and land somewhere on Earth. Because of the uncertainty as to exactly when re-entry will happen, it is unclear where any such pieces might land, but current predictions favor the Eastern Hemisphere so the U.S. will probably miss the show. NASA estimates a 1 in 3200 chance of human casualties from any surviving debris. Although this is no cause for concern, the light show from the re-entry could be impressive if it’s timed right. It could be bright enough to see in daylight! 

Wolfram|Alpha can show you the current position of UARS: 

In the last week, several groups of sunspots on the Sun have been very active and unleashed 3 separate solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CME) aimed in the general direction of Earth.

The first of these was weak and had little effect on us, but the next two were much more powerful, nearly at the peak of the solar flare scale. Scientific analysis has indicated that the two CMEs still headed towards Earth may have merged into one big cloud which is due to hit us sometime today. The exact time of impact is unknown, but if the conditions are favorable, there could be significant geomagnetic activity sometime in the next 24 hours. It could happen in the next few minutes or could be hours away.