100 Interesting Facts about Universe – Part 2

The average distance between asteroids in space is over 100,000 miles, meaning an asteroid field would be very simple to navigate.

27. Two former U.S. astronauts started an organization, independent from NASA, dedicated to launch a telescope called "The Sentinel" that will orbit the Sun and detect any Earth-bound asteroid threats up to decades in advance.

28. New research indicates the asteroid that killed the Dinosaurs did so, not primarily due to dust blocking out the sun, but by ejecting ~500 cubic miles of tiny glass spherules at near escape velocity. Upon falling to earth they incinerated nearly all surface life in a matter of minutes.

29. The tallest known mountain in the solar system is on an asteroid (Rheasilvia).

30. The complex nuclear contents of a neutron star are all named after Italian food.

Most of the gold that is present today in the Earth's crust and mantle was delivered to Earth by asteroid impacts.

32. There's an asteroid in the asteroid belt named after wikipedia (274301 Wikipedia).

33. There is a non-profit organization called B612 which is dedicated to defending the Earth against asteroids.

34. Bill Nye The Science Guy Has a Plan to Launch Laser Bees into Space to Defend Earth Against Asteroids.

35. The dinosaur extinction event is marked by a thin layer of sediment all over the world, which contains 160 times as much Iridium as normal evidence of the global devastation caused by an asteroid impact

The Big Bang was initially rejected as a theory of the universe because of its "religious" implications and its origins; the originator of the theory was a Catholic priest.

37. One theory on why we live in three dimensions is that when the Big Bang occurred, only 3 of the 9 spatial dimensions expanded infinitely.

38. 1% of static on an untuned analog TV is from cosmic background radiation from the Big Bang.

39. A shot glass filled with neutron star matter would weigh as much as Mount Everest.

40. It wasn't until 380,000 years after the Big Bang that the universe became transparent enough to let the light shine through it.

A black hole 12 billion light years away holds at least 140 trillion times the water in all of Earth's oceans combined, making it the largest known reservoir of water.

42. If you shout or make a sound that is 1,100 dB, it will create a black hole destroying our galaxy.

43. Stephen Hawking had to purchase a one-year subscription to Penthouse for Kip Thorne after losing a bet pertaining to the existence of black holes.

44. In 2007, University of Minnesota researchers found a huge hole in the universe a billion light years across that is not a black hole and is completely devoid of matter.

45. S5 0014+81, the biggest supermassive black hole known, is so bright due to its huge event horizon that if it were 100 light years away from Earth (6.31 billion times more distant than the Sun), it would appear just as bright as our host star.

The process of getting torn apart by a black hole is called Spaghettification.

47. Leonard Susskind, the professor of Theoretical physics, sparked a 28-year-old debate with Stephen Hawking, who stated that the information inside a black hole is lost forever, but eventually, Susskind proved him wrong.

48. The Schwarzschild Radius is the size an object is compressed in order to make it a black hole. Earth's Schwarzschild Radius would be compressing it to 8.7 mm, which is roughly the size of a peanut.

49. Supermassive Black Holes in the centers of galaxies can be 11 times bigger than Neptune's entire orbit, and spin at almost the speed of light.

50. John Michell called both the father of seismology and the father of magnetometry. "One of the greatest unsung black scientists of all time", he was the first person known to propose the existence of black holes, earthquakes travel in waves. No one knows what he looked like.