Crazy Facts About The Universe

1. Tonight, when the sun goes down look up. Depending on how dark it is outside you can probably see several thousand stars up there, all of which come from our own galaxy, the Milky Way. If you look a bit closer though, you might be able to spot one of only a few galaxies other than our own that is visible with the naked eye. .....

Other Galaxies

2. If this makes you feel small, it should, because scientists estimate that there are hundreds of billions more galaxies in the universe, none of which you can see without a telescope. Moreover each one of these galaxies has billions of stars which brings the grand total number of stars in the universe to 10 billion trillion which is 10 followed by 21 zeros. Thats more stars than the number of grains of sand on the Earth. .....

Dark Matter

3. All the stars, galaxies, and black holes in the universe only compose about 5% of its mass. As crazy as it sounds, the other 95% is unaccounted for. Scientists decided to label this mystery material dark matter and to this day they are still not sure where or what it is. .....

The Alcoholic Space Cloud

4. For those of you considering opening your own pubs, there is probably no place better than Sagittarius B. Although it is 26,000 light years away this interstellar cloud of gas and dust contains over a billion billion billion liters of vinyl alcohol. Okay, so its not really drinkible but it is a very important organic compound that is critical to the existence of life. .....

Nuking the Moon

5. In the late 1950?s, by way of something labeled Project A119 the United States decided it would be a good idea to launch a nuclear missile at the moon. Why? Evidently they felt it would give them a leg up in the Space Race. Fortunately, however, the plan was never executed. .....

The Ponzo Illusion

6. Have you ever noticed that when the moon is directly on the horizon it appears to be a lot closer and larger? Well, its not. Whats happening is actually something that your brain does all the time. Think about what happens when you see one of your friends on the horizon. Although they appear to be really small your brain doesnt actually interpret them as being that tiny. Something similar is going on with regards to the moon. Known as the Ponzo i .....

The Moon smells like gunpowder

7. Upon leaving the moon astronauts on the Apollo missions described moon dust as smelling like gunpowder and feeling extremely soft. Scientists, however, are still not exactly sure why this is because the two have extremely different compositions with moon dust consisting mostly of small shards of silicone dioxide glass. .....

Biggest Diamond Ever

8. In 2004 scientists discovered the largest diamond ever. In fact its a collapsed star. Measuring 4000 km across and having a core composed of 10 billion trillion trillion carats its roughly 50 light years from the Earth. .....

Venus s day is longer than its year

9. Strangely enough Venus completes an entire orbit around the sun before it manages to turn on its axis once. This means that its day is actually longer than its year and in Venusian time, World War II ended only 56 days ago. .....

Saturn floats

10. As big as the planet Saturn is, if you were to put it in a glass of water, it would float. This is because its density is .687 grams per cm cubed while waters is the famous .998 g per cm cubed. Unfortunately though, you would need a glass that is over 120,000 km in diameter to witness this. .....

Cold Welding

11. This is a phenomenon used to describe the fact that whenever two pieces of metal in outerspace touch each other, they are more or less permanently stuck together. While welding usually requires heat, in this case the vacuum of space does the trick, hence the name. You might think then, how do space shuttles accomplish anything out there? Well, typically metals on Earth have a layer of oxidized material covering their surface that prevents this, s .....

Earth has more than 1 moon

12. Okay, not really, theyre more like moon wannabes but scientists have discovered several asteroids that are more or less following the Earth as it moves around the sun. .....

Space Junk

13. Earth does, however, have over 8,000 objects orbiting around it. Most of these would be classified as space junk or debris left over from spacecraft and missions in the past. .....

Lunar Drift

14. Each year scientists have determined that the moon moves about 3.8 cm further from the Earth. As a result, Earths spin has slowed by about .002 seconds every day over the course of the last century. .....

The Sun s rays on your skin are 30000 years old

15. While most of us know that the light hitting Earth took 8 minutes to cross the 93 million miles between our skin and the surface of the Sun, did you know that the energy in those rays started their life over 30,000 years ago deep within the core of the sun? They were formed by an intense fusion reaction and spent most of those thousands of years making their way to the Suns surface. .....

The Big Dipper is not a constellation

16. While its not our intention to burst your bubble, we thought we should inform you that it is actually an asterism. There are only 88 official constellations in the night sky and everything else, including the Big Dipper, falls into this other category. It is, however, composed of the 7 brightest stars in the Great Bear (Ursa Major) constellation. .....

Constant motion

17. You are standing on a planet that is spinning about its axis while rotating around a star that is revolving around the center of galaxy that is itself barreling through space. Sounds like enough to give you motion sickness right? Well, before you take your Dramamine lets visit our next point. .....

Galileo s Theory of Spacial Relativity

18. So how do you know that the bus you are taking to work is in fact moving? What if you are sitting in the only motionless object in the known universe and everything else, including the road beneath your tires, is moving instead? Well, the truth is that there is no way to prove what is moving and what isnt. Its all relative to your frame of reference. To you the person across the aisle is stationary because your frame of reference is the bus. To t .....

The Speed of Light

19. Going back to the bus example. If you were to shoot an arrow out the window at a target down the road in front of you how fast would it be moving when it hit hit the bullseye? Well, essentially it would be going the speed of the bus about 60 km per hour plus however fast you shot the arrow. Now what if you shined a beam of light at it? Since the light travels at 186,000 miles per second, we would just add the 60 km per hour right? Wrong. Scient .....

The Universal Speed Limit

20. As a result of the aforementioned fact that light cannot exceed 186,000 miles per second, it would follow that nothing can, which is exactly why this has come to be known as the universal speed limit. This however, has some interesting consequences and leads directly into. .....

Einsteins Theory of Relativity

21. Without getting too complex, Einstein essentially came forward with the revolutionary idea that not only is motion relative, but time is too. In fact, they are linked together. The faster you move, the slower others will perceive that time has passed for you. Why? Well imagine this. As you are sitting in the bus you shine a beam of light at the opposite wall. Lets say in 1 second it covers 2 meters before hitting the other side of the bus. Now, l .....

Moving Clocks

22. Everything we just talked about is very relevant to modern technology. In fact, the clocks in onboard computers and navigation equipment have to take into account the effects of relativity. For example, if you measured the time that had elapsed on a fighter pilots wristwatch, you would find that it lagged behind your watch by several nanoseconds. .....

Adding a nanosecond to your life by never climbing stairs

23. Remember high school physics? Because the force of gravity increases near the surface of the Earth, so does your acceleration which means exactly what youre thinking time slows down. Once again, this is very relevant to modern day society because at different altitudes clocks tick at different speeds. Also, remember that since the earth is rotating, someone standing near the equator is moving faster than someone on the north pole. Once again, th .....

Twins Paradox

24. If you have been keeping up so far then this wont be too much of a leap. The famous twins paradox postulates that if you put one twin on a spaceship that was moving near the speed of light through space and left another on Earth, due to the effects of relativity, the twin in the space ship would return to the planet significantly younger than his Earth bound sibling. .....

Black Holes

25. At one point these intergalactic vacuum cleaners were actually super massive stars. When one of those stars dies it generally blows of its gaseous outer layers and the core collapses into an extremely small and dense sphere. Imagine, for example, trying to pick up a tennis ball containing the entire mass of the Sun. The immediate effect of this astronomically high density would be an insanely strong gravitational field. In order to break free fro .....

All 6 Billion People On Earth Can Fit Inside An Orange

26. If I can just be allowed to explain, 99.9% of an atom is just empty space. Well heck, everyone knows that!, I hear you cry. As is the case with many facts we tend only to recognise this point in theory, because we cannot really envisage what an atom is like to look at. It is very small. To put this point into perspective, if you removed all the empty space from the atoms that make up all the humans on the planet then you could fit all 6 billion o .....

Most Of The Universe Appears To Be Missing

27. So, lets take stock of where we are here. We have ascertained that the universe is pretty astounding when considered at a vast scale. We have established that the universe consists of atoms. We have also worked out that atoms contain space mostly and a very tiny amount of matter. Leaving aside the worrying fact that we are made of atoms, how much matter is there in the universe? According to the Planck mission team, and based on the standard mode .....

Light Does not Always Travel Very Fast

28. Nothing travels faster than light. Thats something we hear bandied about quite a lot. Another is, Light is a constant. We can measure everything alongside it. Sometimes we hear that light can have its direction of travel altered, e.g. when it passes close to a star. The truth is that light can end up going quite slowly and it is not quite the constant many believe it is. What people mean to say, or should rather express, is that light travels at .....

Electrons Colliding At The Edge Of The Universe Affect Us On Earth Instantaneously

29. Another simplification of explanations about atoms concerns the .....

You Can Never Use The Past To Predict The Future

30. At first sight this statement might look like nothing more than an observation about the bleeding obvious were it not for the fact that it hides a deep truth about the structure of the universe. None of us can predict the future, but Chaos Theory implies that we never will be able to either. For centuries astronomers tried to compare the solar system to an enormous mechanism revolving around the sun something like a gigantic clock. Unhappily fo .....

Quasar I hardly know her

31. Quasars are the things that happen when gases within black holes start moving around super fast and emitting heat and light. Theres this huge group of quasars though that is over 4 billion lightyears wide and completely contradicts scientific theory on .....

Not necessarily alone

32. Do not watch Signs after reading this. So there are somewhere around 300 billion stars in our galaxy, and around 100 billion planets. Of these, about 8.8 billion planets are capable of hosting life forms. .....

Circle of life

33. Somewhere around 275 million stars are born and die every day. .....

Our closest neighbor is invisible to the naked eye

34. That would be the Andromeda Galaxy, and if we COULD see it, it would be somewhere around 6 times the size of the moon (despite being 2.5 million lightyears away). .....

Raspberry and rum flavored space

35. Ethyl formate, one of the leading ingredients in both raspberries and rum, can be found aplenty in the Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers have suggested that theres a high likelihood the Universe smells accordingly. .....

There Are at Least 10 Billion Trillion Stars in the Universe

36. Thats a very big number. When you really think about it, 10 billion trillion stars makes the cult of sun worship seem a little obsolete, although our star, the sun, is very important to us. Without it, life on earth wouldnt be possible. Lets put 10 billion trillion stars into perspective, shall we? For those of you who know a bit of math, that would be 10 to the power of 22 stars, or written out, it would be 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. There .....

One Million Earths Could Fit Inside The Sun

37. Even though there are a lot of stars out there, none is more important to us than our own sun. When compared to other stars, its fairly small, classified as a G2 dwarf star. But that doesnt mean were complaining. Approximately one million Earths could fit inside this dwarf star. It might not be the largest star in the universe, but it gets the job done as far as sustaining life on Earth goes. .....

The Universe Is Getting Bigger

38. In the 1920s, astronomer Edwin Hubble made the revolutionary discovery that the universe is not static, but rather is expanding. But, it was long thought that the gravity of matter in the universe would slow this expansion or even cause it to contract. In 1998, the Hubble Space Telescope studied very distant supernovas and found that, a long time ago, the universe was expanding more slowly than it is today. This puzzling discovery suggested that .....

The Universe s Growth Spurt Is Accelerating

39. Mysterious dark energy is not only thought to be driving the expansion of the universe, it appears to be pulling the cosmos apart at everincreasing speeds. In 1998, two teams of astronomers announced that not only is the universe expanding, but it is accelerating as well. According to the researchers, the farther a galaxy is from Earth, the faster it is moving away. The universes acceleration also confirms Albert Einsteins theory of general relat .....

The Universe Could Be Flat

40. The shape of the universe is influenced by the struggle between the pull of gravity (based on the density of the matter in the universe) and the rate of expansion. If the density of the universe exceeds a certain critical value, then the universe is closed, like the surface of a sphere. This implies that the universe is not infinite but has no end. In this case, the universe will eventually stop expanding and start collapsing in on itself, in an .....

The Universe Is Filled With Invisible Stuff

41. The universe is overwhelmingly made up of things that cannot be seen. In fact, the stars, planets and galaxies that can be detected make up only 4 percent of the universe, according to astronomers. The other 96 percent is made up of substances that cannot be seen or easily comprehended. These elusive substances, called dark energy and dark matter, have not been detected, but astronomers base their existence on the gravitational influence that bot .....

There May Be More Universes

42. The idea that we live in a multiverse, in which our universe is one of many, comes from a theory called eternal inflation, which suggests that shortly after the Big Bang, spacetime expanded at different rates in different places. According to the theory, this gave rise to bubble universes that could function with their own separate laws of physics. The concept is controversial and had been purely hypothetical until recent studies searched for phy .....