Space – man’s final frontier! For years, “The Space” has been the subject of many famous movies and writers. Space holds the key to mankind’s greatest mysteries and motivates to unveil some of the most mysterious and elusive questions to mankind like “Why are we all here”, “How did the universe begin”, “Are there others like us or are we alone” and many more. Read on our article, where we attempt to amaze you with some cool facts which will surely leave you in awe of the greatest mystery ever – “The Universe”
1. There may be more universes
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, space-time 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.
2. An asteroid might hit the Earth in 2029
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 chance 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 asteroid will crash into Earth. Let’s hope Apophis gives the planet a miss, otherwise you can stop paying into your retirement account right now.
3. We are made out of stars
Human beings are literally made out of star stuff. Almost all of the chemical elements that make up a person come from the stars. Any element heavier than hydrogen originated in the stars, and we are definitely composed of more than hydrogen.
Calcium, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and around 60 other basic ingredients make up a human being. Since hydrogen and helium were the only elements around before the stars “cooked” up some more, it’s a safe bet that most of the substance that constitutes the “physical” you come from the stars.
4. Our galaxy is on a collision course with the Andromeda Galaxy
The Milky Way Galaxy, is on a collision course with our nearest neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy. However, destined to collide together, you should not lose your sleep thinking about the event. The imminent impact will not occur for the next 3 billion years. Unless you plan to cryogenically freeze yourself or something else, you are very unlikely to be around!
5. When you look into the night sky, you are looking back in time
The stars we see in the night sky are far away from us, the light we see so far has taken a long time to travel in space to reach our eyes. This means that whenever we look outside at night and see stars, we actually experience how they looked in the past. For example, the bright star Vega is relatively close to us at a distance of 25 light-years, so the light we see is left 25 years ago; while the Beteluse star in Orion’s constellation is 640 light years away. We still see other stars far away, so we are seeing them much deeper into their past.
6. There’s a giant cloud of alcohol in Sagittarius B
Sagittarius B is a massive molecular cloud of gas and dust that floats near the centre of the Milky Way, 26,000 light-years from the Earth, 463,000,000,000 kilometres in diameter, and, surprisingly, contains 10 billion-billion-billion litres of alcohol. Well, don’t think it’s a never-ending party. It could kill you!
7. There’s a planet-sized diamond in Centaurus
Astronomers have discovered the largest known diamond in our galaxy, a large lump of crystallized 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, so large than the planet Earth, and weighs about 10 billion-trillion-trillion carats.
8. A spoonful of neutron stars weighs about a billion ton
Neutron stars spin incredibly quickly and are also incredibly dense. It is estimated, if you could collect a tablespoon of matter from the centre of a neutron star, it would weigh about one billion tons. Neutron stars are thought to be the fastest spinning objects in the universe. Pulsars are a particular type of neutron star that emit a beam of radiation which can be observed as a pulse of light as the star spins. The rate of this pulse allows astronomers to measure the rotation.
9. There could be 500 million planets capable of supporting life in our galaxy
Scientists searching for supernatural life focus on “Goldilocks planets”; these are planets that fall within the habitable zone of a star. The Milky Way alone has an estimated 500 million potential Goldilocks planets, so if life can exist in places other than Earth, there are a large number of possible planets that it can thrive on. If these numbers are applied to all galaxies in the universe, there may be a staggering diversity of planets capable of supporting life.
10. The human brain is the most complex object in the whole universe
Our brains are remarkably complex objects with a hundred billion neurons, a quadrillion connection, and we still know very little about how this organic supercomputer operates. But we know that the human brain is the most complex thing we have discovered. It empowers us to understand language and culture, consciousness, thoughts of self, ability to learn, and to understand the universe and reflect our place within it.
