Top fascinating facts About the Universe that will Surprise You!

Representative Image(credits: Unsplash)

As you all know, the Universe is an ocean of mysteries, and each day our scientists and researchers are finding out crazy facts about it. If you are in a mood to learn intriguing facts about the Universe, then you are in the right place!!

Here are some mind- boggling facts about the Universe you all would love to know:

The most Complex object in the entire Universe is the Human Brain

The human brains are remarkably the most complex objects with a hundred billion neurons, a quadrillion connections, and we still don't know much about how this organic super computer operates. But we do know the human brain is the most complicated thing we have yet discovered. It gives us the power to form language and culture, consciousness, the idea of self, the ability to learn, and understand the universe and reflect on our place within it. We even have an inbuilt “model of gravity“, which is pretty useful.

The Universe Is expanding

In the 1920s, astronomer Edwin Hubble made the revolutionary discovery that the universe is not static, but rather is expanding. It was long thought that the gravity of matter in the universe would slow this expansion or even cause it to contract.

However, in 1998, the Hubble Space Telescope studied very distant supernovas and found that, a long time ago, the universe was expanding more slowly than it is today. This puzzling discovery suggested that an inexplicable force, called dark energy, is driving the accelerating expansion of the universe.

While dark energy is thought to be the strange force that is pulling the cosmos apart at ever-increasing speeds, it remains one of the greatest mysteries in science because its detection remains elusive to scientists.

The Universe: Its Old

universe

The universe is believed to begin with the Big Bang, and is estimated to be approximately 13.7 billion years old (plus or minus 130 million years).

Astronomers calculated this figure by measuring the composition of matter and energy density in the universe, which enabled them to determine how fast the universe expanded in the past. As a result, researchers could turn back the hands of time and pinpoint when the Big Bang occurred. The time in between that explosion and now makes up the age of the universe.

The rate of growth of the Universe is Increasing

Mysterious dark energy is not only thought to be driving the expansion of the universe, it appears to be pulling the cosmos apart at ever-increasing speeds. In 1998, two teams of astronomers announced that not only is the universe expanding, but it is accelerating as well. According to the researchers, the farther a galaxy is from Earth, the faster it is moving away.

The universe's acceleration also confirms Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, and lately, scientists have revived Einstein's cosmological constant to explain the strange dark energy that seems to be counteracting gravity and causing the universe to expand at an accelerating pace. [Full Story]

Three scientists won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for their 1998 discovery that the expansion of the universe was accelerating.

There’s a giant cloud of alcohol in Sagittarius B

Sagittarius B

The Sagittarius B, a vast molecular cloud of gas and dust floating near the centre of the Milky Way, is 26,000 light-years from Earth, and 463,000,000,000 kilometres in diameter and, amazingly, it contains 10-billion-billion-billion litres of alcohol. The vinyl alcohol in the cloud is far from the most flavoursome tipple in the universe, but it is an important organic molecule which offers some clues how the first building blocks of life-forming substances are produced.

The Universe may be Flat

The shape of the universe is influenced by the struggle between the pull of gravity (based on the density of the matter in the universe) and the rate of expansion. If the density of the universe exceeds a certain critical value, then the universe is "closed," like the surface of a sphere. This implies that the universe is not infinite but has no end. In this case, the universe will eventually stop expanding and start collapsing in on itself, in an event known as the "Big Crunch."

If the density of the universe is less than the critical density value, then the shape of the universe is "open," like the surface of a saddle. In this case, the universe has no bounds and will continue to expand forever.

Yet, if the density of the universe is exactly equal to the critical density, then the geometry of the universe is "flat," like a sheet of paper. Here, the universe has no bounds and will expand forever, but the rate of expansion will gradually approach zero after an infinite amount of time. Recent measurements suggest that the universe is flat with roughly a 2 percent margin of error.

The Universe constitutes massive amounts of invisible stuff

The universe is overwhelmingly made up of things that cannot be seen. In fact, the stars, planets and galaxies that can be detected make up only 4 percent of the universe, according to astronomers. The other 96 percent is made up of substances that cannot be seen or easily comprehended.

These elusive substances, called dark energy and dark matter, have not been detected, but astronomers base their existence on the gravitational influence that both exert on normal matter, the parts of the universe that can be seen.

The Universe Has Echoes of Its Birth

The cosmic microwave background is made up of light echoes left over from the Big Bang that created the universe 13.7 billion years ago. This relic of the Big Bang explosion hangs around the universe as a pocked veil of radiation.

The European Space Agency's Planck mission mapped the entire sky in microwave light to reveal new clues about how the universe began. Planck's observations are the most precise views of the cosmic microwave background ever obtained. Scientists are hoping to use data from the mission to settle some of the most debated questions in cosmology, such as what happened immediately after the universe was formed. 

A Person looking at the Night Sky is looking back in Time

The stars we see in the night sky are very far away from us, so far the star light we see has taken a long time to travel across space to reach our eyes. This means whenever we look out into the night and gaze at stars we are actually experiencing how they looked in the past. For example, the bright star Vega is relatively close to us at 25 light-years away, so the light we see left the star 25 years ago; while Betelgeuse (pictured) in the constellation of Orion is 640 light-years away, so the light left the star around 1370, during the time of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. Other stars we see are further away still, so we are seeing them much deeper in their past.

The Hubble telescope looks back billions of years into the past

Hubble Telescope

The Hubble Telescope enables us to look towards very distant objects in the universe. Thanks to this remarkable piece of engineering NASA has been able to create some incredible images, one of which is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Created using images from the telescope from 2003 and 2004, the incredible picture displays a tiny patch of the sky in immense detail; it contains 10,000 objects, most of them young galaxies, and acts as a portal back in time. In one picture we are transported 13 billion years into the past, just 400 to 800 million years after the Big Bang, which is early in terms of the universe’s history.

Sometimes our television displays a glimpse of the Big Bang

Television Disturbance(Credits: Youtube)

Cosmic background radiation is the afterglow and heat of the Big Bang, the momentous event that kick-started our universe 13.7 billion years ago. This cosmic echo exists throughout the universe, and amazingly we can use an old-fashioned television set to catch a glimpse of it. When a television is not tuned to a station you can see the black and white fuzz and clacking white noise, around 1% of this interference is made up cosmic background radiation – the afterglow of creation.

There’s a diamond as big as a planet in Centaurus known as Lucy

Astronomers have discovered the largest known diamond in our galaxy, it’s a massive lump of crystallized diamond called BPM 37093, otherwise known as Lucy after The Beatles’ song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Found 50 light-years away in the constellation of Centaurus, Lucy is about 25,000 miles across, so much larger then planet Earth, and weighs in at a massive 10 billion-trillion-trillion carats.

The Sun takes 225 million years to travel round the galaxy

Whilst the Earth and the other planets within our solar system orbit around the Sun, the Sun itself is orbiting around the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way. It takes the Sun 225 million years to perform a complete circuit of the galaxy. The last time the Sun was in its current position in the galaxy the super-continent Pangaea was just about starting to break apart and early dinosaurs were making an appearance.

Our solar system’s highest mountain is on Mars

Olympus Mons

The Olympus Mons on Mars is the tallest mountain in the entire solar system. The mountain is a gigantic shield volcano (similar to volcanoes found in the Haiiwain Islands) standing at 26 kilometres tall and sprawling 600 kilometres across. To put this into scale, this makes the mountain almost three times the height of Mount Everest.

Each pole of Uranus enjoys Summer/Winter for 42 years

Uranus

Most of the planets in the Solar System spin on an axis similar to the Sun’s; slight tilts in a planet’s axis causes seasons as different parts become slightly closer or further from the sun during their orbit. Uranus is an exceptional planet in many ways, not least because it spins almost completely on its side in relation to the Sun. This results in very long seasons – each pole gets around 42 Earth years of continuous summer sunlight, followed by a wintry 42-year period of darkness. Uranus’s northern hemisphere enjoyed its last summer solstice in 1944 and will see in the next winter solstice in 2028.

Duration of a year is more than that of a day in Venus

Venus

Venus is the slowest rotating planet in the Solar System. In fact, it is so slow that it takes longer to fully rotate than it does to complete its orbit. This means Venus has days that last longer than its years. It’s also home to one of the most inhospitable environments imaginable, with constant electronic storms, high CO2 readings, and it’s shrouded by clouds of sulfuric acid.

The fastest spinning bodies in the Universe are Neutron Stars

Neutron stars are thought to be the fastest spinning objects in the universe. Pulsars are a particular type of neutron star that emits a beam of radiation which can be observed as a pulse of light as the star spins. The rate of this pulse allows astronomers to measure the rotation.

A spoonful of a neutron star weighs about a billion tons

Neutron stars spin incredibly quickly and are also incredibly dense. It is estimated, if you could collect a tablespoon of matter from the centre of a neutron star, it would weigh about one billion tons.

 The Voyager 1 spacecraft is the most distant human-made object from Earth

Voyager 1

The Voyager Program launched two spacecraft, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, in 1977. The probes explored the planets and moons of the outer Solar System over several decades and are now continuing their mission to travel through the heliosphere at the edge of our Solar System and continue to voyage into interstellar space.

On March 20 2013, Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to leave the Solar Sytem and is now the furthest human-made object from Earth, currently 124.34 Astronomical Units away. This is a LARGE distance, really large!

The Voyager 1 had captured the most distant photograph of the Earth

In 1990, as part of the spacecraft’s ongoing mission, Voyager 1 turned its camera back on our home planet and took a picture. This became known as The 'Pale Blue Dot'. Astronomer Carl Sagan, who first suggested the idea of the photograph, noted, “From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But that's something really unique for us!

Scientists are looking for evidence of extraterrestrial life on Earth

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a project to discover whether intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe and how we may contact extraterrestrial species. The search includes looking for life on other planets and moons. For instance, some of Jupiter’s moons (such as Io) are promising places to look for evidence of primitive life, but the search for extraterrestrial life includes scientific research on Earth.

If scientists can discover evidence life has generated independently more than once it would suggest life could occur in more than one place, for more than one time. For this reason scientists are searching for evidence that life could have happened more than once on earth, with intriguing prospects for the universe as a result.

It is estimated there are 400 billion stars in our galaxy

Scientists have claimed that there are about 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Our Sun is essential to us, the centre of our Solar System, and our source of light and energy, but it is just one of many, many stars that make up our home galaxy. 

500 million planets may have life in the Milky Way galaxy

Scientists searching for extraterrestrial life focus on “Goldilocks Planets“; these are planets which fall into a star’s habitable zone. Planet Earth seems to have exactly the right conditions for life to exist – its distance from the Sun means the temperature is right, water can exist as a liquid solid and a gas, and there are the right combination of chemical compounds available to build complex life forms. Other planets thought to have similar features are known as Goldilocks planets.

In the Milky Way alone there are estimated to be 500 million potential Goldilocks planets, so if life can exist in places other than Earth there is a huge number of potential planets on which it might thrive. If these numbers are applied to all the galaxies in the universe there could be a staggering variety of planets capable of supporting life. Of course, we have no evidence life exists elsewhere, but if it does there are plenty of places for it to set up home.

It is believed that there are numerous universes

This is more speculative theory than a fact, but several branches of mathematics, quantum mechanics, and astrophysics have all come to similar conclusions: our universe is just one of many and we actually exist in a ‘multiverse’.

There are different ideas of how this could be, one being the concept of atoms only capable of being arranged in a finite number of ways in time and space, ultimately leading to the repetiton of events and people. Other theories propose bubble or parallel universes and ‘braneworlds’ that hover just out of reach of the dimensions we experience. Although these concepts seem like the far-fetched ideas of science-fiction, they are actually proving to be the most elegant solutions to problems thrown up by our discoveries of how the universe works.

We are all a part of some star

This may sound fanciful, but the reality is almost every element found on Earth was created in the burning core of a star, all the stuff that makes up life on Earth, therefore our bodies are made from stardust. NASA have studied stardust extensively, and you can read more about their research on their official website. A NASA stardust canister is pictured above.

In the words of Carl Sagan, “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”

The International space station is the most expensive object ever built.

International Space Station

Humanity's most expensive single object floats 248 miles above the Earth. It's the $100 billion International Space Station, which houses six astronauts in a modular set of pressurized tubes that span the footprint of one and a half 747 jets.