FALSE! The closer you are to the centre of the Earth, the slower time goes – and this has been measured. At the top of Mount Everest, a year would be about 15 microseconds shorter than at sea level.

A day on Earth lasts exactly 24 hours

FALSE! What you think of as a day – how long it takes the Earth to rotate – isn't 24 hours. It's 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.2 seconds. The reason it's 24 hours from sunrise to sunrise is because every day the Earth moves further in its orbit round the sun – and the change in its position lengthens the day slightly.

When the dinosaurs were alive, there were 370 days in a year.

TRUE! When the dinosaurs were alive, there were 370 days in a year. The Earth's spin is getting slower because the moon's gravity is acting as a drag, so days are getting longer, by about 1.7 milliseconds per century.

On Mercury, a year is two days long.

FALSE! On Mercury, a day is two years long. It takes longer for it to rotate on its axis than to orbit around the sun!

Because light takes time to reach us, everything we see is in the past.

TRUE! Because light takes time to reach us, everything we see is in the past. The sun you can see out of the window is 8 minutes and 20 seconds old. The light from our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4 years old.

The universe is 2000 years years old, give or take a few decades.

The universe is 13.8 billion years old, give or take. If we compressed that into a year – with the Big Bang happening at 1 second past midnight on 1 January – then the dinosaurs would be wiped out on 29 December, and modern humans would appear at 11:54pm.

The oldest known object on Earth is a 4.4 billion year-old crystal, a ZIRCON, that was found in Western Australia

The oldest known object on Earth is a 4.4-billion-year-old crystal, a zircon, that was found in Jack Hills in Western Australia. It's only 160 million years younger than the Earth itself.

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