81 Otherworldly Facts About the Universe – Part 2

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.

27. 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.

28. 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.

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

30. 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.

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.

32. 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.

33. 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.

34. Even if a black hole were to replace our sun, Earth and the other planets would orbit the black hole as they orbit the sun now, not get sucked in.

35. Mark Twain predicted his own death in 1909, "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it." He died in 1910, a day after the comet returned.

When Earth passed through the tail of Halley's Comet during its 1910 approach, there was public fear that a gas discovered in the tail, cyanogen, would destroy all life on the planet, leading to people buying gas masks and "Anti-Comet Pills."

37. Eugene Shoemaker, who co-discovered comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, died in a car crash on his way to see comet Hale-Bopp. Some of his ashes were taken to the moon in 1999, making him the only person to be buried on a celestial body outside Earth.

38. After 11 years in space, the Rosetta probe was intentionally crashed into a comet in order to provide close-up photos on its final descent. Scientists said they wanted it to go out in "true rock'n'roll style."

39. Comet West (also known as "The Great Comet") may not return for at least another 6.5 million years, according to an estimation.

40. Astronomer Charles Messier was obsessed with finding comets. He only cataloged other "Messier Objects" in order to help him avoid wasting time when comet hunting.

The first "Picture" of Halley's comet can be seen on the Bayeux Tapestry which was possibly completed in 1077.

42. There's a preferred pathway throughout the Solar System that is determined by gravitational fields this is where every comet travels.

43. The Rosetta spacecraft, while studying comet 67P, discovered electrons cause the rapid breakup of water and carbon dioxide molecules erupting from the surface, not photons (light) as previously thought.

44. While in space, astronauts sometimes see random flashes of light caused by cosmic rays hitting the optic nerve. We don't see it on earth because the magnetosphere protects us from the rays.

45. Astronauts in the Apollo program reported seeing "streaks" of white light every 3 minutes, even when they closed their eyes.

Dark matter could warm certain planets in the place of a sun, allowing life to arise on a sunless planet.

47. The tallest possible mountains on a neutron star can only be about 5mm tall due to their gravity.

48. The elusive "Dark Matter" in the universe could be detected by looking for time glitches in the existing network of GPS satellites. One researcher is already mining 15 years' worth of GPS timing data for its signature.

49. If a marshmallow were dropped a foot above the surface of a neutron star it would have the same energy of a modern atomic bomb.

50. If you had a baseball-sized piece of neutron star material it would weigh 20 trillion kg, about 40 times the estimated weight of the entire human population