Mental Floss

SPACE

YouTube / Davies Robinson

Professor Frank Drake proposed a super-depressing formula explaining why we haven't gotten alien radio signals yet.

Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

The Cola Wars were so heated in the summer of 1985 that even NASA got involved.

Eneas de Troya, Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0

It's a triple star system.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Releases First Images

No, the Sun isn't actually on fire. Here are a few more myths about space that are ready for debunking.

NASA

Only 12 people have walked on the moon, but you can spend all of eternity there.

Wikimedia Commons

Planet George wouldn't be the butt of nearly as many jokes as Uranus.

Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain

It looks like a license plate or a random jumble of letters and numbers put together by a preschooler. But “6EQUJ5” is the most tantalizing lead we have so far towards one day answering one of the most profound questions we can ask: is there intelligent l

Twitter user, @StationCDRKelly

You have to travel to especially high latitudes to get even an earth-bound view of the Aurora Borealis. But this latest look at the Northern Lights comes from an even more remote location: On board the International Space Station.

Chs87 via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 4.0

Vote for your favorite!

NASA

161 retired spacecraft use this spot as their watery grave.

iStock

The current energy output across more than 200,000 galaxies is only about half as strong as it was 2 billion years ago.

Kartik Ramanathan, Flickr // CC BY-NC-NC 2.0

Some 100 meteors an hour will blaze across the sky tomorrow night. It's going to be the best show in five years.

European Southern Observatory

The Southern Owl Nebula offers a preview of what's to come for our own sun.

That's the North Pole in the upper-left corner.

NASA/Eugene Cernan

Want to live on the moon? These space programs are way ahead of you.

NASA

We can think of Kepler-452b as an older, bigger cousin to Earth.

NASA

Before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin could set foot on the moon, they had to toss their trash.

NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI

Some initial conclusions about Pluto and Charon, its largest moon.

NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

The closest encounter in the historic flyby just happened a few minutes ago. Here are the instruments New Horizons used to capture scientific data.

NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

We're witnessing history tomorrow as the 'New Horizons' probe reaches Pluto.

Mark Garlick/University of Warwick

New astronomical observations show that exoplanets can have gas tails, like comets.

NASA

ESA

Temperature spikes on boiling-hot Venus have scientists thinking the planet has active volcanoes.