Completely False ‘Facts’

                   This may not have hit your radar when it happened, and even if it did, you might not have given it a second thought. But we did, my friend, we did. In 2005, the Spitzer Space Telescope (launched in 2003) beamed back conclusive proof that the Milky Way isn't the simple spiral galaxy you've seen illustrated your whole life. It's really a barred spiral galaxy. So instead of elegant arms coiling out from a central sphere, there's a big fat bar across the middle, and the arms of our galaxy sprout from either end.

               Now, scientists had been debating this possibility and trying to come up with decisive proof one way or the other for years. And when they did – not much happened. Some mainstream news outlets gave it a little airtime, and the astronomy community talked it up for a while. Once the space devotees all knew about it, everyone else continued on in blissful ignorance, not knowing they were imagining the galaxy they lived in all wrong.

                From geography to physiology, there are many examples of people collectively doing it wrong by learning fiction as truth. Here are some of the biggest errors walking around masquerading as well-known facts.

                Mount Everest is one whopping big mountain, but is it the tallest in the world? In fact it is not. A mountain is highest in regard to how far it soars above sea level. But technically it is tallest from base to summit. And Mauna Kea kills it at being the tallest.

                Here's the deets: Above sea level, Mauna Kea (in Hawaii) is only 13,799 feet (4,206 meters). But when you count the crazy enormous portion of it that's underwater, it's 33,465 feet tall (10,200 meters). Everest, that snobby little upstart, is only 29,029 feet (8,848 meters) above sea level, with none of it below sea level.

               But the shame doesn't end there. Mount Kilimanjaro hasn't taken the stand yet. Kilimanjaro is 19,340 feet (5,895 meters) top to bottom. So it's not as tall as Everest – but Everest is surrounded by the rest of its friends, the Himalayas, all of which are collectively growing by a quarter of an inch per year and pushing Everest's summit higher. Kilimanjaro, on the other hand, is solitary, rising out from the relative flatness of Tanzania all on its dramatically striking own.