20 Amazing Facts About the Universe You Won’t Believe

 20. Most Amazing Facts About the Universe You Won’t Believe  The universe is a pretty amazing place, from the unimaginably large, r...

 20. Most Amazing Facts About the Universe You Won’t Believe 

The universe is a pretty amazing place, from the unimaginably large, right down to the incredibly small. There’s an awful lot going on in this field we call “existence.”With the recent discovery of what is most likely the elusive Higgs boson particle, or some variant thereof, by scientist’s working at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, there’s a lot of buzz surrounding information having to do with the fabric of the universe. The standard model of theoretical physics says the Higgs boson particle is responsible for all the mass in the universe, which is a heck of a lot of matter.

Let’s take a look at some of this awe-inspiring matter now, as well as a look at the Higgs boson particle, and see how we fit inside the intricate patterns that make up everything.

1. When you look into the night sky, you are looking back in time

The stars we see in the night sky are very far away from us, so far the star light we see has taken a long time to travel across space to reach our eyes. This means whenever we look out into the night and gaze at stars we are actually experiencing how they looked in the past. For example, the bright star Vega is relatively close to us at 25 light-years away, so the light we see left the star 25 years ago; while Betelgeuse (pictured) in the constellation of Orion is 640 light-years away, so the light left the star around 1370, during the time of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. Other stars we see are further away still, so we are seeing them much deeper in their past.

2. Planet Covered With Burning Ice

Do you know this? 33 light years from us, there is an exoplanet, which is completely covered in burning ice.

3. Even When You’re Standing Still, You’re Still Moving

A human body, or any object on the Earth, is never at rest. Even when you’re asleep in bed, you’re moving pretty fast. Our Milky Way Galaxy is rotating at 225 kilometers per second, and hurling through the cosmos at an estimated 305 kilometers per second. Add those figures together, and we’re racing through space at around 530 kilometers, or 330 miles per second. So in one minute’s time, you’ve  traveled almost 20,000 kilometers, or more than 12,000 miles. And your friends always complain that you never go anywhere.

4. The Hubble telescope allows us to look back billions of years into the past

The Hubble Telescope enables us to look towards very distant objects in the universe. Thanks to this remarkable piece of engineering NASA has been able to create some incredible images, one of which is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Created using images from the telescope from 2003 and 2004, the incredible picture displays a tiny patch of the sky in immense detail; it contains 10,000 objects, most of them young galaxies, and acts as a portal back in time. In one picture we are transported 13 billion years into the past, just 400 to 800 million years after the Big Bang, which is early in terms of the universe’s history.

5. Smell of Space

Astronauts say that, space smells like hot metal, welding fumes and seared steak.

6. There Are at Least 10 Billion Trillion Stars in the Universe

That’s 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 wouldn’t be possible.

Let’s 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 world’s beaches. If only 1% of those stars had Earth-like planets, the universe would literally be teeming with life.

7. You can watch the Big Bang on your television

Cosmic background radiation is the afterglow and heat of the Big Bang, the momentous event that kick-started our universe 13.7 billion years ago. This cosmic echo exists throughout the universe, and amazingly we can use an old-fashioned television set to catch a glimpse of it. When a television is not tuned to a station you can see the black and white fuzz and clacking white noise, around 1% of this interference is made up cosmic background radiation – the afterglow of creation.

8. There’s a giant cloud of alcohol in Sagittarius B

Sagittarius B is a vast molecular cloud of gas and dust floating near the centre of the Milky Way, 26,000 light-years from Earth, 463,000,000,000 kilometres in diameter and, amazingly, it contains 10-billion-billion-billion litres of alcohol. The vinyl alcohol in the cloud is far from the most flavoursome tipple in the universe, but it is an important organic molecule which offers some clues how the first building blocks of life-forming substances are produced.

9. Earth Can Become A Black-hole

Earth (Also read: Amazing facts about Earth) can become a black hole.  This can be achieved by compressing earth down to the size of a marble, it would collapse by itself.

10. An Asteroid Might Hit The Earth in 2029

This didn’t exactly end well.

The greatest chance so far, according to astronomers, of a large asteroid colliding with the earth and wiping life out is in 2029. Asteroids have hit the planet before, and caused mass extinctions, so there is some precedent for it happening again.

The culprit this time is the Apophis Asteroid (99942 Apophis), which is headed our way in 2029. There’s a little less than a 3% chance that this bad boy will crash into terra firma. Let’s hope Apophis gives the planet a miss, otherwise you can stop paying into your retirement account right now.

11. There’s a planet-sized diamond in Centaurus named after a Beatles song

Astronomers have discovered the largest known diamond in our galaxy, it’s a massive lump of crystallised diamond called BPM 37093, otherwise known as Lucy after The Beatles’ song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Found 50 light-years away in the constellation of Centaurus, Lucy is about 25,000 miles across, so much larger then planet Earth, and weighs in at a massive 10 billion-trillion-trillion carats.

12. Most of Your Body Mass is Stardust?

Do you know that most of your body mass is stardust?  90% of body mass is star dust, because all the elements are created in stars, except hydrogen and helium.

13. Neutron Stars Are Very, Very Heavy

What exactly is a neutron star, you might be wondering? Well, neutron stars are the densest object known in the universe. They are created inside large stars during a supernova explosion. When the core of the star collapses, electron and proton pairs get crushed down into neutrons.

While neutron stars are only about 10-13 miles in diameter, they are heavier than many stars. A thimbleful, or sugar cube, amount of a neutron star weighs around 100 million tons. That’s more than a large mountain.

14. It takes 225 million years for our Sun to travel round the galaxy

Whilst the Earth and the other planets within our solar system orbit around the Sun, the Sun itself is orbiting around the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way. It takes the Sun 225 million years to perform a complete circuit of the galaxy. The last time the Sun was in its current position in the galaxy the super-continent Pangaea was just about starting to break apart and early dinosaurs were making an appearance.

15. One Million Earths Could Fit Inside The Sun

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, it’s fairly small, classified as a G2 dwarf star. But that doesn’t mean we’re 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.

16. Our solar system’s biggest mountain is on Mars

Olympus Mons on Mars is the tallest mountain on any of the planets of the Solar System. The mountain is a gigantic shield volcano (similar to volcanoes found in the Haiiwain Islands) standing at 26 kilometres tall and sprawling 600 kilometres across. To put this into scale, this makes the mountain almost three times the height of Mount Everest.

17. Our Galaxy Is on a Collision Course with the Andromeda Galaxy

The Milky Way Galaxy, which is to say our very own galaxy, is on a collision course with our nearest neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy. Even though these two conglomerations of stars are destined to smash together, you shouldn’t lose any sleep over the incident. The impending impact won’t happen for another 3 billion years. The chances of you being around for that galactic “fender bender” are pretty slim, unless you’re planning to cryogenically freeze yourself or something.

18. The Earth Is Billions of Years Old

Our planet has been around for quite some time. It’s been around, in fact, for about 4.54 billion years, give or take 0.02 billion years. Life has only been on the planet for a short amount of time, but the variety of life that has crawled, slithered, swam and trod upon the planet is pretty spectacular — from single celled organisms, to giant sharks and snakes, to dinosaurs, to mammals. If that comet coming in 2029 (and again, in 2036) misses the planet, hopefully we’ll thrive here for a long time to come.

19. Uranus spins on its side, with some rather strange results

Most of the planets in the Solar System spin on an axis similar to the Sun’s; slight tilts in a planet’s axis causes seasons as different parts become slightly closer or further from the sun during their orbit. Uranus is an exceptional planet in many ways, not least because it spins almost completely on its side in relation to the Sun. This results in very long seasons – each pole gets around 42 Earth years of continuous summer sunlight, followed by a wintry 42-year period of darkness. Uranus’s northern hemisphere enjoyed its last summer solstice in 1944 and will see in the next winter solstice in 2028.

20. A year on Venus is shorter than its day

Venus is the slowest rotating planet in our Solar System, so slow it takes longer to fully rotate than it does to complete its orbit. This means Venus has days that last longer than its years. It’s also home to one of the most inhospitable environments imaginable, with constant electronic storms, high CO2 readings, and it’s shrouded by clouds of sulfuric acid.

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