crazy facts about the universe

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

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.

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

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).

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.

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 are probably more stars in existence than grains of sand on all of the worlds beaches. If only 1% of those stars had Earthlike planets, the universe would literally be teeming with life.

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.

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 an inexplicable force, called dark energy, is driving the accelerating expansion of the universe.

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 relativity, and lately, scientists have revived Einsteins cosmological constant to explain the strange dark energy that seems to be counteracting gravity and causing the universe to expand at an accelerating pace.

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 event known as the Big Crunch. If the density of the universe is less than the critical density value, then the shape of the universe is open, like the surface of a saddle. In this case, the universe has no bounds and will continue to expand forever.