The Vastness of the Universe

For anyone who’d ever looked up at a clear night sky and admired the countless shimmering stars, it’s clear – we inhabit just a small bit of a vast cosmos. To put things into perspective, the milky way alone houses around 200 billion stars and thousands of planets. Now imagine this – there are at least two trillion galaxies like ours in the observable universe. It’s indeed hard to fathom how big the universe actually is.

The Universe is Nothing but Mostly Nothing

Sounds contradictory, right? But it’s true. The matter which forms stars, planets, galaxies, and you, and I make up only about 5% of the universe. A whopping 27% is dark matter and 68% is dark energy, both mysterious entities that scientists are still trying to understand.

There’s Silence, Absolute Silence

One would think that a cosmos teeming with stars, planets, and galaxies would be a noisy place. But in reality, it’s mute. This is due to the fact that sound, which is a vibration of air particles, needs a medium to propagate. The vacuum of space lacks this air, so sound has no way to travel, making space a place of absolute silence.

There Could Be Multiverses

Multiverse theory postulates that we might just live in one of countless universes. They may each have different physical laws and constants, or they might be “parallel universes”, possibly even hosting copies of us, making decisions where we made other choices.

The Universe is Graveyard of Stars

Stars, they are just like humans. They’re born, they live, and they die. And just as we leave our bodies behind, stars too, leave remnants. For instance, our own Sun will one day shrink to a small, white dwarf. Larger stars however, go out with a bang, creating stunning supernovae – some of the most powerful events in the universe.

Diamond Planets Do Exist

A planet made entirely of diamond, sounds luxurious, doesn’t it? Meet 55 Cancri e. This exoplanet, twice the size of our Earth, is believed to be “a carbon planet” which effectively means it could contain huge quantities of diamond. If that wasn’t intriguing enough, there’s also a star, BPM 37093, which is believed to have a core made up of 10 billion trillion trillion carats diamond!

The Universe is Speeding

If you believe that the universe is at a peaceful, constant state, then here’s something that might shock you. Everything in the universe is moving! The Earth rotates on its axis and orbits the Sun, which in turn orbits around the center of the Milky Way. And our galaxy? It’s speeding through space at a pace of 2.1 million kilometers per hour. Even more fascinating is the fact that the universe isn’t just expanding, it’s actually getting faster in its expansion as time goes by.

The Mysterious Entity – Black Holes

These gravity behemoths are some of the most mystifying entities in the cosmos. Extremely dense and excessively powerful, their gravitational pull gobbles up everything – even the fleet-footed light! They’re so intensely black that they’re impossible to see directly. It’s only thanks to the technology like Event Horizon Telescope that we got a picture of one.

Planets That Rain Glass

Indeed. There’s an exoplanet, HD 189733b, where it’s believed to rain glass, and that too sideways. A space “hot Jupiter”, this planet’s extremely high temperature vaporizes silicate particles in its atmosphere, then condenses them into glass, which its intense winds blow horizontally.

The Universe Has No Centre

If you imagine the universe to be similar to our Earth, or any other planet we know for that matter, then let us burst your bubble. The universe has no center! Or maybe, it’s right to say that every point can be considered the center since from any given vantage point, the universe appears to be expanding uniformly in all directions.

Slightly unsettling yet utterly fascinating, isn’t it? These mind-boggling facts are just a tiny peek into the countless marvels our universe holds. As we continue to explore the cosmos, who knows what other bewitching truths are waiting to unfurl themselves.