› added 4 years ago

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TIL that Sagittarius A* - the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way - has a mass 4 million times that of our Sun, but a diameter only 31 times the Sun's. It is so dense that it could fit in the space between the Earth and the Sun, but can attract things 50k light years away.

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0dpo5 TIL in 1990, a panel of the windscreen on British Airways Flight 5390 fell out at 17,000ft, causing the cockpit to decompress & its captain to be sucked halfway out of the aircraft. He survived.
v1y0L TIL that the Stanford Prison Experiment, the infamous experiment that many psychological works reference, was actually mostly a fraud and that many of the participants were faking.
JP1 TIL that General Eisenhower ordered every citizen Gotha, Germany to tour the concentration camp Ohrdruf (a subcamp of Buchenwald). After the mayor of the town and his wife did so, they went home and hanged themselves (#80)
OGgyY TIL that the Sacré-Cœur Basilica in Paris was considered so ugly by some that there was a plan to put up a full-sized Statue of Liberty in front to hide it.
E1547 TIL that the nautical terms for either side of a ship, Port and Starboard, were changed to the current terms due to the confusion caused by the old term for the left side. The terms used to be Larboard and Starboard.