Informative Short Stories That Inspire Curiosity and Wonder

The most distant traveller.

The space probe Voyager 1 left the Earth in 1977, two weeks after its twin, Voyager 2.

Voyager 1 continues to travel through space at over 60,000 kilometres per hour (about 37,000 miles per hour) and is the most distant man-made object that has ever left Earth.

To us, that speed seems very fast, but to put it into perspective.

Imagine if Voyager 1 were to change direction and travel towards Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way. That epic journey would take roughly 450 million years.

As of July 2026, that small probe is over 25.5 billion kilometres (about 15.86 billion miles) from Earth.

Chances are that Voyager 1 will still be travelling through space as the last human on Earth dies.

I wonder if another intelligent life form will discover our tiny probe.

Gazing up at the night sky.

When viewing the night sky, you're looking back in time.

Reflected light from the Moon left its surface 1.3 seconds before it made contact with your eyes.

The Sun is about 150 million kilometres (around 93 million miles) from the Earth, so light leaving the Sun takes just over eight minutes to reach us. You're seeing the Sun as it was just over eight minutes ago.

Now, take the farthest-away object that you can see with your own eyes. The light from the Andromeda Galaxy that you are seeing now left on its long journey 2.5 million years ago, so you are seeing the galaxy as it was way back then.

From one location on Earth, a person can see roughly 2,500 stars on a clear night.

By the way, the speed of light is 1,080 million kilometres per hour (about 670 million miles per hour).

The beginning of everything.

Scientists believe the universe began approximately 13.8 billion years ago.

It was the beginning of space and time. The newly born universe could now start on its long evolutionary path.

As the universe expanded and cooled, there came a time called the cosmic dark ages. No stars, no galaxies, and no other celestial objects existed at that time.

Imagine a sky that is pitch black. That's how it was for about 200 million years after the Big Bang, then the first stars burst into life, lighting up space.

Go back about 4.5 billion years. This is when our planet was being formed. Microorganisms have been living on the Earth for over 3.7 billion years.

The evolutionary path for life has been extremely long, but at last, we have arrived. Billions of species have existed here on Earth, but we are the only ones that can question our existence.

Poor Pluto was demoted to a dwarf planet.

Pluto had its planet title taken away in 2006, leaving eight planets in our solar system.

Pluto is now classified as a dwarf planet, with a diameter of 2,370 kilometres (about 1,470 miles), which makes it smaller than our Moon.

It takes an incredible 248 Earth years to make one full journey around our local star, the Sun.

The space probe New Horizons had a close flyby of Pluto in 2015, giving us great images and a wealth of new information about this mysterious dwarf planet and its five moons.

What does it take to be a planet?

It must orbit a star, in our case the sun.

It needs enough gravity to form a spherical shape.

It must be big enough to clear away other objects in its orbit around the Sun.

Pluto failed because of the last requirement.

Could aliens look any stranger than us?

We speculate on what extraterrestrials would look like; we've all seen sci-fi movies with strange-looking creatures. But we give little thought to the weird and diverse life that has evolved on our planet.

Could aliens be any stranger-looking than the complex life we see on Earth?

From the deepest oceans to the tallest mountains, life can exist and flourish.

One exception is the Atacama Desert in Chile; some parts of the desert have seen no water for decades. Without sufficient water, very little life is possible.

I wonder what visiting aliens would think of all the different organisms that share our world. But of course, they would notice how we humans have shaped our world with technology.

It gets no colder than absolute zero.

We often talk about how cold or how hot something is; this short article on temperature might interest you.

Higher temperatures can get extremely hot.

The core of the Sun can reach 15 million degrees Celsius (about 27 million degrees Fahrenheit), which is nothing compared to the higher temperature scale.

Cold temperatures are more understandable.

The lowest directly recorded air temperature on the surface of the Earth was at Vostok Station, Antarctica, at a very cold –89.2 degrees Celsius (–128.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

But it can get a lot colder in the far reaches of outer space.

The dwarf planet Pluto is much farther away from the Sun than any of the planets in the Solar System. Its surface temperature can be as low as –240 degrees Celsius (–400 degrees Fahrenheit).

It doesn't end there; absolute zero is the lowest temperature possible at –273.15 degrees Celsius (–459.67 degrees Fahrenheit).

British spelling.

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