Space is cool, right? The infinite universe we live in is filled with many wonders you would never find here on planet Earth. This little list gives you just a few examples of the weird and wonderful things you’ll find. Some of these points are advanced-level stuff, so if you want to impress your science teachers or the crush you have that sits near you in lessons, you’ve come to the right place.
The atoms in your body are completely replaced every ten years, so after ten years you are literally not the same person. Atoms are the teeny tiny things that make up everything in the universe, and because humans change and develop, they need to be replaced.
Everyone (and everything) in the world is made up of stuff that came from an exploded star. This stuff was scattered across the Universe when it began, just after the Big Bang.
If you dug a hole through the centre of the Earth, it would take you 42 minutes to fall through it and end up on the other side. If you know about the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, some say this is one of the reasons the meaning of life is the number 42.
It takes our solar system 225 million years to orbit the centre of the Milky Way – the galaxy we live in. The last time it was in this position, dinosaurs roamed the planet. Long time ago, eh?
If you fell into a black hole and travelled past the very heart of it, you would witness the entire future of the Universe unfold in front of you in a matter of seconds. Well, that’s before you get stretched so thin your body becomes an atom wide – so don’t try it at home!
The moon may not be far away in terms of space, but you can fit all the planets in the solar system between the Earth and the Moon with a bit of room to spare.
Light travels at 300 million metres per second, but it still takes 8 minutes for it to travel from the Sun to Earth. That shows you just how far away it is!
It’s very likely that aliens exist, just not in the bits of space that we’ve seen. The main reason we have not come into contact with them is because they are billions of light years away. Famous scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson said if looking at the Universe we know and deciding that because we haven’t seen any aliens, there aren’t any is like getting a cup of water from the sea and deciding whales cannot exist.
Finally, The light humans can see is a tiny proportion of the light that actually exists, so even when the sky is lit up by stars at night, and you’re looking through a telescope, we are practically looking at the Universe blind. Much of our knowledge about the Universe has come from microwaves and radio waves etc. What will we discover in future?
Wow! That’s incredible. The universe is an incredibly huge place, and it’s really inspiring to dream about the things humankind could find one day.
This article was written with the help of Cameron Rose, a physics student at Exeter University.
Image from: http://provotips.com/2015/03/06/the-bff-list-2-the-space-center/
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