100 Interesting Facts About Universe

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1z8 GND 5296.

z8 GND 5296.

The oldest and therefore furthest known galaxy we have discovered is over 13.7 billion light years away. It's called z8_GND_5296. The light has taken so long to reach us that the star which collapsed to form the gas that Sun is made out of wasn't "born" yet. Galaxies this far away from help astronomers understand the very early universe and how it has evolved over time. Due to the expansion of space, the distant galaxy pictured here technically wouldn't be there anymore and would actually be “currently 13.1 Giga light-years away from us. or 4.0×109 pc."


2. White dwarf stars will eventually stop emitting light and become black dwarfs. There aren't any old enough in the universe for this to have happened yet and it's estimated that it could take about a quadrillion years.


3. Pope John Paul II once told Stephen Hawking to not study the beginning of the universe because it was the work of God.


4. Plasma is actually the most common phase of matter in the universe. Despite being rare on Earth. The Sun, the stars, and the most interstellar matter is plasma.


5. In 2008, a gamma-ray burst was observed. It was a violent cosmic explosion, 7.5 billion light-years away, which is halfway across the visible universe, which could have been seen with a naked eye from the surface of the Earth. Anyone who saw it was looking billions of years into the past with their eyes.


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6Lights of galaxies

Lights of galaxies

The light of galaxies greater than 14.7 billion light years away will never reach us because those parts of the universe are receding away from us faster than the light speed.


7. Graham’s number is a number so large that the observable universe is far too small to contain an ordinary digital representation of Graham’s number, assuming that each digit occupies one Planck volume (smallest meaningful measurement).


8. Galileo was placed under house arrest by The Holy Office until his death in 1642 for defending his views about the Earth not being the center of the universe. The Vatican formally acknowledged they were wrong and Galileo was right in 1992.


9. There is a large area of space that is devoid of any galaxies that have been theorized by cosmologist Laura Mersini-Houghton, to be the imprint of a parallel universe.


10. There is a “one-electron universe” hypothesis which proposes that there exists a single electron in the universe, that propagates through space and time in such a way that it appears in many places simultaneously.


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11Outer Space Treaty

Outer Space Treaty

According to Article VIII of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, you can be arrested for a crime committed anywhere in the known universe.


12. If you could fold a piece of paper in half 103 times, it would be as thick as the observable universe.


13. Our current model of physics only works for 4% of the matter/energy in the universe.


14. Over time a white dwarf will cool into a black dwarf. Given the length of time it takes for this to happen (10s-100s of billion years) and because our Universe’ age (13.8 billion years old), none are expected to exist yet.


15. The common spiral depiction of the Milky Way Galaxy used in media is actually another galaxy: Messier 74. Because we dwell within the Milky Way Galaxy, it is not yet possible for us to take a picture of its spiral structure from the outside.


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16IC 1101

IC 1101

The largest galaxy in the observable universe is an elliptical galaxy, IC 1101. It has 100 trillion stars and is 6 million light years across. By comparison, the Milky Way has a mere 100 billion stars and is 120,000 light years across.


17. If you watched an object slip into a black hole, no matter how long you watched, you would never actually see the object enter it due to time dilation.


18. A region near a black hole is called a photon sphere where the gravitational pull is so strong that light photons orbit it, meaning if you were at that point and turned to the side, you could see the back of your own head.


19. The fastest spinning Neutron stars known to man, rotate at 716 complete rotations per second.


20. The largest known black hole (Holmberg 15A) has a diameter of 1 trillion km, more than 190 times the distance from the Sun to Pluto.


21OMG particle

OMG particle

The Oh-My-God particle was an ultra-high-energy cosmic ray that was detected on 15 October 1991 by the University of Utah. It was traveling so absurdly fast that time dilation dictates that it would have experienced only 16 days of time since the beginning of the universe.


22. The coldest known natural place in the Universe is the Boomerang Nebula. At −272.15°C it is 1°C warmer than absolute zero, and 2°C colder than background radiation from the Big Bang.


23. The Pillars of Creation, a nebula 7,000 light years away, was destroyed by supernova 6,000 years ago. In a thousand years, we will see it destroyed as it takes 7,000 years for the light to reach Earth.


24. The SN 1006 supernova was the brightest star event in recorded human history. It was widely seen on Earth beginning in the year 1006. Some historical sources state that it was bright enough to cast shadows.


25. A neutron star is so dense that if an object was dropped from one meter above the star’s surface, it would hit the surface at a speed of 7.2 million km per hour.

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4 COMMENTS

  1. Regarding: “5. In 2008, a gamma-ray burst was observed…”

    According to some scientists, “ There is evidence that suggests that a somewhat nearby GRB could have occurred about 450 million years ago, which might have led to a mass extinction. However, the evidence for this is still sketchy. A nearby gamma-ray burst, beamed directly at Earth, is pretty unlikely.”

    947

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