The universe is a freaking huge place and there’s all sorts of bizarre and crazy things out there. Here are ten tidbits I found rather interesting.

 

10 Scientists estimate there are about 100 octillion stars in the universe. Wait, what the heck is an octillion? That’s a 1 with 27 zeros after it. In other words there are this many stars:

100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

That’s more than the number of the grains of sand on Earth. Oh by the way, get used to these large numbers.

9There’s an interstellar cloud of gas about 26,000 light years away called Sagittarius B. It happens to contain a billion billion billion liters of vinyl alcohol. Told you there were some big numbers here. Imagine how wasted someone could get off that. I’m thinking that Sawyer and Tyler should film their next drunk collab there…

 8Astronauts say that space smells like hot metal and welding fumes. That’s not so bad considering how difficult it is to go the bathroom in a zero gravity environment. Think about how careful you gotta be up there, one mistake and that “stuff” will float everywhere… I might write about that another day…

7If you were to put Saturn in a large enough glass of water, it would float. Kinky, huh? Too bad that glass of water would have to be over 120,000 km in diameter.

 6 Venus’ day is longer than it’s year. It’s also the only planet in the solar system to rotate in a clockwise direction. All us normal planets rotate counter-clockwise. I think Venus is just being stubborn.

5While I’m on the subject of Venus, there’s a collapsed star about 50 light years away from Earth that has a very distinctive feature about it. It’s a giant diamond, in fact it’s the largest diamond ever found. It’s a billion trillion trillion carats large. It’s official name is BPM 37093, but it has the much more interesting nickname of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

4Here’s another big number, it’s estimated that the universe is 46 billion light years in radius. And considering that the consensus is that the universe began about 13.798 billion years ago, it would literally take longer than forever to go from one side of existence to the other. Oh yeah, the universe is also constantly expanding. So good luck with that road trip…

3It’s estimated that there are 500 million Goldilocks planets in our galaxy. A Goldilocks planet is one that is “not too far” and “not too close” but just the right distance from its sun where life could be supported. That’s a lot of potential life out there. In the words of the great Neo, “Whoa!”

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2The Earth’s rotation is slowing down by about 17 milliseconds per century. When the dinosaurs were around, the length of the day was actually closer to 22 hours.

1And my personal favorite tidbit of information is actually a rather simple one. Despite everything we have discovered out there in the vast infinity of space, the human brain is still the most complex object we’ve found so far. Made up of 86 billion neurons and a quadrillion connections, we’re still not 100% sure how it works. If anything is awe-inspiring, it’s the 1.5 grams of grey matter between our ears. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

I hope you learned a little something from this.

 

Posted by Jonathan Cocco