65 of The Most Mind-Blowing Facts About Our Universe

Hubble has captured a set of galaxies that have such a strong gravitational pull that they warp time and light, an effect known as gravitational lensing and this specific set of galaxies creates the appearance of a smiley face.

2. Mira, a dying star zipping through our universe is shedding its matter, each bit of which may one day grow into a new, individual star of its own. NASA has called it “The Johnny Appleseed of The Universe.”

3. The edge of the observable universe is ~46 billion light years away despite the universe being only ~13.8 billion years old.

4. Ancient Egyptians believed that the universe was created due to an ejaculation and Egyptian Pharaohs were required to masturbate ceremonially into the Nile.

5. The average color of the universe is a beige-ish white and therefore the color is named "Cosmic Latte"

During one of Stephen Hawking’s lecture in Japan, he was asked not to mention the possible re-collapse of the universe, billions of years into the future, for fears of its effects on the stock exchange

7. Thanks to the experiments conducted in CERN, we now know that every atom in the Universe could be undone in an instant by a simple, unpredictable and an unstoppable event, i.e., a quantum tunnel causing a phase-shift in the Higgs field.

8. A 'Googolplex' is such a large number, that if you were to write a '1', followed by a '0' on every single hydrogen particle in the known universe, you would not even get close to writing out the full number.

9. Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.468 billion years or about 1/3 the estimated age of the universe

10. Approximation of Pi to 39 decimals is accurate enough to calculate the volume of the known universe with a precision of one atom.

The loudest events in the universe are starquakes. The largest ever recorded was in 2004, the star Magnetar SGR 1806-20 adjusted itself with the force equal to 22.7 on the Richter scale. It happened 50,000 light years away from Earth, but if it would have been 10 light years away, it would have caused a mass extinction of all animal and plant species on earth.

12. There are more variations in the game of chess than there are atoms in the known universe.

13. Bismuth has a half-life of more than a billion times the estimated age of the universe.

14. There is a theory proposed by many physicists that our universe may exist inside a black hole and that every black hole in our Universe may contain a totally new Universe.

15. It is theorized that there may hypothetical objects that behave just the opposite of a black hole called a white hole. They cannot be entered from the outside, but matter and light can escape. The Big Bang might have been a white hole itself, and big bangs possibly occur at the center of all black holes.

Theoretically, if astronauts traveled in a spaceship at a constant 1 g of acceleration, they could travel the entire universe in their own lifetime, while billions of years would have passed by on earth.

17. There is a theory that our universe has collided with other universes in the past and we can view its scars by studying the night sky

18. Only about 0.0000000000000000000042% of the universe contains any matter. The universe is a pretty empty place.

19. Some scientists theorize that space and time started as one dimension each (basically a straight line). As it cooled, the universe warped into the 2nd-4th dimensions. Some think that the Universe will eventually be promoted again, to a five-dimensional state.

20. Even though the Big Bang happened 13.7 billion years ago, and no object can move faster than the speed of light, the diameter of the known universe is at least 46 billion light years. It is because the expansion of the universe itself can occur faster than the speed of light. Particles cannot travel faster than the speed of light since if a particle has mass then it takes an infinite amount of energy to pass the speed of light. Space-time has no such limitation.

The coldest temperature ever recorded in the known universe was in Massachusetts, MIT, where scientists attained temperatures 810 trillionths of a degree Fahrenheit above the absolute zero (-459.67°F).

22. The universe has existed for just .00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001377% of its expected lifetime

23. Before the Hubble Space Telescope was launched, scientists were convinced that the Universe was no longer expanding. Not only is the Universe still expanding, but it is doing so at the rate of 74 kilometers (48 miles) per second.

24. In approximately 1 Googol (10^100) years, there will be no life, stars, or even black holes left in the universe; only subatomic particles with no way to interact will remain in the ever expanding universe.

25. A popular homeopathic treatment for the flu is a 200C dilution of duck liver, marketed under the name Oscillococcinum. As there are only about 1080 atoms in the entire observable universe, a dilution of one molecule in the observable universe would be about 40C. Oscillococcinum would thus require 10320 more universes to simply have one molecule in the final substance.