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The biggest star that man knows is 1,700 times bigger than the sun!
1.
When you place your finger over a star in the sky, you prevent photons that have traveled undisturbed to Earth for millions of years from finally getting into your eye.
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Photons are a basic unit of light. They are made in the center of a star and will travel millions of years before reaching Earth. When you block a star in the sky with your finger, you are really preventing million-year-old photons from entering your retina.
2.
Do you know where the coldest place in the known universe is? How about the hottest one? Well, they are both here on earth!
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Well they were. The coldest measured temperature in the universe was generated here in a laboratory on Earth (-273 degrees Celsius or absolute zero), and the Large Hadron Collider also managed to achieve the hottest recorded temperature since the beginning of the universe with the Big Bang (5.5 ) to generate trillion degrees Kelvin).
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And in around 4.5 billion years, the Milky Way is expected to collide with the Andromeda Galaxy, our closest galactic neighbor, and form a giant elliptical galaxy.
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And our big old red neighbor, Jupiter, is twice the size of all the other planets in our solar system combined!
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Only one section of the planet’s surface – a gigantic 150 year old storm called the “Great Red Spot” – is itself twice the size of Earth!
7th
There is a planet in our galaxy where temperature can reach over 1,000 degrees Celsius during the day and which may rain molten glass horizontally at a rate of about 4,500 miles per hour!
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The planet, known as HD 189733b, was discovered using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and is a cobalt blue color.
8th.
Scientists believe they have found a parallel universe in a void one billion light years across.
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It’s a pretty controversial hypothesis, but the void – which is devoid of all matter – can be evidence of a multiverse. It was discovered in 2007 and is 40 times larger than the largest previously recorded gap.
9.
So we know it takes a long time for light to travel through space, right? Well, there are actually some parts of the universe that we cannot see because the light from there has not yet reached us.
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The universe is so extraordinarily large that the light from these galaxies that were formed during THE BIG BANG has still not reached us!
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However, the James Webb Space Telescope will soon allow us to explore galaxies that formed at the beginning of the universe and observe stars that make up planetary systems.
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12th
Did you know that an estimated 500,000 pieces of space debris are floating above the earth and moving at speeds of up to 2,700 km / h?
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Space debris is basically anything we carelessly float around in space – rocket pieces, dead satellites, what have you got?
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It’s mostly larger satellites that have survived the fiery reentry process, and to be honest, they mostly land in the ocean (ugh) or some remote area. There is an entire team of researchers devoted to tracking space debris and monitoring the risk of collision with Earth – as far as we know, no one died when hit by an old satellite!
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But here’s the thing, there’s a phenomenon like the Kessler Effect, where a single destructive event in low Earth orbit could cause all of the satellites to crumble into smaller and smaller fragments until the planet is surrounded by a massive fragment cloud.
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This would make it almost impossible to ever leave Earth.
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There’s a villainous supermassive black hole that speeds through space at about five million miles per hour.
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Usually every galaxy contains a black hole, but this one was ejected from its home galaxy, 3C 186. This is likely the result of a collision between two galaxies that may have united both black holes. Astronomers predict that in 20 million years it will break out of its galaxy and roam the universe forever.
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The probe was launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn and is now on its second mission outside the solar system. It will now drift through interstellar space forever. The earth will likely be evaporated by the sun in a few billion years, while Voyager 1 will likely still move through space.
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Venus is a living hell today. It has a suffocating carbon dioxide atmosphere and there is almost no water vapor; The temperatures there reach 462 degrees Celsius! But climate models suggest that ancient Venus may have had oceans and a dry land pattern like ours. Various factors – including the water-to-land ratio and the notion that clouds may protect Venus from strong sunlight – suggest that the planet was once habitable.
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This is known as “cold welding” and occurs because the atoms of both individual bits do not know that they belong to different pieces of metal and therefore bond together. This does not happen on earth because air or water always separates the parts.
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These rogue planets don’t orbit any star, so it’s pretty hard to see them – in fact, we don’t know if there are any around. Statistically, however, they’re not close enough to be cause for concern, and given the size of the solar system, we’re a pretty small target really.
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According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, dark matter is the longest standing unsolved mystery in modern astrophysics. In fact, it might not even matter! Basically, the force of gravity in the universe does not quite correspond to the observable mass – the planets, the stars, the galaxies, the comets, the black holes and the dark clouds. Scientists therefore suggest that there is a large amount of unobservable or “dark” mass in the universe that is the source of all this gravity.
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This idea is based on a complicated theory known as vacuum decay – basically a self-destruct button for the universe! It is only speculative at this point, but it depends on whether the universe is in a true vacuum or a false vacuum – a true vacuum is stable, but a false vacuum is not. If a random quantum fluctuation allowed a false vacuum to release its potential energy, it would create a bubble of real vacuum that would expand at the speed of light, erasing every single object it touched. The destruction would happen instantly and depending on where it happened in the universe we may never see it coming. Remember, this is just a theory!
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And finally, this is not a fact per se, but did you consider the possibility that we already sent a message to an alien race in the distant past and it is still finding its way to them?
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Space is huge, we’ve established that by now, and chances are we sent a message into space thousands of years ago and forgot about it (think about how societies change over time). We could either wait for this message to arrive or wait for a response to get back to us. With that in mind, we would keep introducing ourselves to anyone else who is out there …
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