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40 Random Bits of Trivia About the Universe You’ll Be Glad to Know Before Your Next Trip to Space

Black holes are somehow even freakier than they sound

40 Random Bits of Trivia About the Universe You’ll Be Glad to Know Before Your Next Trip to Space

January 19, 2025

Can we all stop to appreciate the Universe right now? It’s a fact-finder’s dream come true. Not only does it encompass everything that we find facts about, but since it’s ever-expanding, it always continues to give us more things to find facts about! It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

Here are a few existing facts, but please come back later for the expansion pack…

40

Sky of Ghosts

SKY FULL OF GHOSTS CRACKED.COM In 1802, William Herschel discovered that a telescope is like a time machine. The sun's light takes just over 8 mins to reach us, so when we look at the sun, we see it as it was 8 mins ago. Не stated, Some stars are so far away that by the time their light reaches Earth, they are already dead. We see their light, but their bodies perished long ago.

39

The Earth’s Core

TIME IS DIFFERENT IN THE EARTH'S CORE The Earth's core is 2.5 years younger than the surface because of time dilation. It sounds like something from Star Trek, but it's true. CRACKED

38

One With the Universe

WE ARE ONE WITH THE UNIVERSE CRACKED.COM Many of the atoms we're made of, like the calcium in our bones and the iron in our blood, were born in the heart of an exploding star billions of years ago. All of the hydrogen atoms in us are as old as the universe itself, formed in the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

37

Neutron Stars

NEUTRON STARS CRACKED.COM When a massive star explodes, its scrunched up core forms a neutron star, which is so dense that just a teaspoon of it would weigh more than Mt. Everest. The star's explosion can spin the neutron star to speeds up to 600 rotations per second.

36

The Oldest Galaxy

The oldest known galaxy can be viewed as it was 13.4 billion years ago. CRACKED.COM The oldest known galaxy in the uni- verse is 32 billion light-years away from us. — Source

35

The Night Sky

We don't see stars in the night sky where they are actually located. Since even light is affected by gravity, the light from distant stars actually bends around our sun as they pass through the solar system. CRACKED NOW YOU KNOW — Source

34

Time in Space

ASTRONAUTS ARE YOUNGER THAN PEOPLE THE SAME AGE Astronauts on the ISS experience a slight slowing of their aging compared to people on Earth, because of the way gravity and speed affect the passing of time. CRACKED

33

Rogue Planets

Space is filled with rogue planets. These planets don't orbit a star, they simply drift throughout the galaxy after being ejected from their star systems. CRACKED.COM — Source: Atlantic

32

One Million Earths

The sun is as big as one million earths. Solar image by - Beady It also accounts for 99.8% of our solar system's mass. CRACKED.COM — Source

31

Pluto

The person who named Pluto lived long enough to see its planet status removed. CRACKED COM Venetia Burney, who at age 11 suggested the name Pluto for the ninth planet in our solar system, lived to see it demoted to a dwarf planet in 2006. — NASA

30

The Random Transiter

One of the most mysterious stars in the galaxies the The Random Transiter. CRACKED.COM it has 28 equal plan- et-sized objects orbiting it in random ways. The Ке- pler planet-hunter space- craft observed this star for 87 days during the second- ary K2 part of its mission. — Source

29

Aristarchus

18 Amazing People Too Many Of Us Haven't Heard Of - This Greek astronomer was the first person to present a model of the solar system, with the Sun at — Source: Nature

28

The Big Splat

The Big Splat What if the Big Bang was actually a Big Splat of two colliding universes? Some cosmologists believe that our ever-expanding universe could expand right into another expanding universe, generating enough energy to create a whole new universe. CRACKED.COM

27

Gravity

CRACKED x MYTH There is no gravity in space. FACT Gravity is found everywhere in the universe (for example, it keeps the Moon and the Earth in their orbit around the Sun). There is a lot less gravity, but this is technically referred to as microgravity. — Source

26

The Only Planet That Spins Clockwise

CRACKED VENUS IS THE ONLY PLANET IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM THAT SPINS CLOCKWISE. Scientists believe this is because the planet was actually knocked upside down, due to a collision millions or billions of years ago. — Kevin Gill/Flickr
Royal Museums Greenwich

25

Galaxies

SO MANY GALAXIES CRACKED.COM By taking detailed pictures of small parts of the sky and counting all the galaxies in them, then multiplying the number of pictures needed to photograph the whole sky, astronomers estimate approximately 2,000,000,000,000 galaxies in the universe. That's 2 trillion. — Source

24

Supernovae

Supernovae explode on an average once every 100 years in a galaxy. CRACKED.COM Assuming there are 170 billion galaxies in the universe, there are 53 supernovae exploding every sin- gle second. — Source

23

The Darkest Planet

The darkest planet ever discovered absorbs nearly all of the light that touches it. CRACKED.COM Our Milky Way is home to the darkest planet ever discovered, a distant, Jupiter-sized gas giant named TrES-2b. It reflects less than 1% of the sunlight falling on it, making it blacker than coal or any planet or moon in our solar system. — Source

22

Eris

When a size cutoff for planets was made in 2005, we lost more than just Pluto. Eris, discovered in 2005,would have qualified as the 10th planet in the solar system until its discovery prompted the International Astronomical Union to formally define 'planet' with a size cutoff, that also excluded Pluto. CRACKED NOW YOU KNOW — Space

21

Mercury

On average, the closest planet to both Earth and Pluto is Mercury. CRACKED COM When averaged over time, Earth's nearest neighbor is in fact Mercury. Mercury is also the nearest planet to every other planet in the solar system. — Physics Today

20

Uranus

URANUS IS THE COLDEST PLANET IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM. CRACKED ...even though Neptune is farther from the sun by about a billion miles. — Hull / New Scientist

19

Io

Jupiter's nearest orbiting Galilean moon, lo, is the most geologically active object in the Solar System. GRACKED.COM This extreme geologic activity is the result of tidal heating from fric- tion generated within lo's interior as it is pulled be- tween Jupiter and the other Galilean moons. — NY Times

18

The Solar System

If we ever left the Solar System to explore strange new worlds, the Earth would be here waiting for us. Except that the solar system is constantly moving. We're essentially a missile that screams through space at 45,000 miles per hour, with the sun's constant solar wind bombardment pushing aside interstellar debris like a cowcatcher. CRACKED.COM http://solar-center.stanford.edu/FAQ/Qsolsysspeed.html — Source: 23 Facts That Challenge Accepted Beliefs About Outer Space

17

Jupiter

Jupiter is the fastest spinning planet in our solar system. CRACKED.COM Due to the intensity of its rotation the planet is flat at the poles and bulges at the equator. It takes less than 10 hours for it to com- plete a rotation on its axis. — Tufts

16

Space Rocks

CRACKED A WEIRD SPACE ROCK MOVING THROUGH THE SOLAR SYSTEM In 2018, two astronomers from Harvard suggested that Oumuamua, the strange, cigar-shaped object that flew through our solar system, could be an alien probe from outer space. — Time / NASA

15

Other Galaxies

We've only known that other galaxies exist for 100 years. Before 1920, we just figured the Milky Way contained every star in the universe. NOW YOU KNOW CRACKED.COM — Source

14

Ton 618

One of the brightest (and biggest) things in the universe is a black hole. CRACKED COM The mass of the central black hole of Ton 618 is at least 66 billion solar mass- es. This is higher than the mass of all stars in the Milky Way galaxy com- bined, which is 64 billion solar masses. — New Atlas

13

The Surface Temperature of Venus

HOTTEST PLANET GRACKED.COM Even though Venus is twice as far from the sun as Mercury, it is 62 degrees с hotter. The surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead, regularly hitting 870 degrees F (465 degrees C) making Venus the hottest planet in our Solar System. And those temps don't even drop at night!

12

Water in Space

There's a floating reservoir of water in space that holds 140 trillion times all the water on Earth. CRACKED.COM NASA scientist Matt Brad- ford says that water is pervasive throughout the universe, and the reser- voir surrounding a black hole 12 billion light years away surely proves that. — Source: 15 Ice-Cold Facts To Beat The Summer Heat

11

Ganymede

One of Jupiter's moons is larger than a planet in our solar system. GRACKED.COM Jupiter's moon, Gany- mede, is larger than Mercury and would be classed as a planet if it were orbiting the Sun rather than Jupiter. — Source

10

The Sun’s Mass

THE STAR OF THE SHOW CRACKED.COM The sun makes up 99.86% of the mass of the solar system. That means if you add up every other physical object-planets, dwarf planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and any other icy thing floating around, it would only account for 0.14% of the solar system. — Source

9

The Milky Way

A TRIP AROUND THE GALAXY CRACKED.COM The sun (and our solar system, obviously) orbits the centre of the Milky Way, and one full lap takes 225 million years. That means that the last time the Sun was in its current position in the galaxy, early dinosaurs were just starting to make an appearance. — Source: lifehack

8

Supermassive Black Holes

A SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE AT THE HEART OF EVERY GALAXY CRACKED.COM The light we see in galaxies doesn't come from its stars, but from heated matter swirling into a giant black hole up to 50 billion times the mass of the Sun. Almost every galaxy, including our Milky Way, has one. — Source: skyatnightmagazine

7

Water

Some of the water you drink is older than the Sun. 4 2+ 8 CRACKED.COM That's even though the Sun is older than the Earth. Some water predates the whole solar system, molecules unchanged for billions of years. — Scientific American

6

Stars

The Sun is only one among 300 sextillion stars. Our solar system revolves around the incredibly insignificant star that's one in 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. And those are just the estimated stars in the observable universe. CRACKED.COM — Source: PMC

5

The Moon

You can fit every planet in the Solar system between the Earth and the Moon. While everyone knows the Moon revolves around the Earth, most people don't have the right idea of how far it is. Depending on where the Moon is in its orbit, there's enough room to fit every planet in the Solar System end to end in the intervening space. — More: 5 Everyday Science Facts (Nearly Everybody Gets Wrong)

4

Solar Storms

A solar storm almost destroyed our civilization. In July 2012, the Sun ejected a huge-ass bullet of magnetized plasma into space. Had it happened only — More: 5 Chilling Disaster Scenarios Mankind Just Barely Avoided

3

Venus

if you were born on venus you'd celebrate your finst birthday before you were even a day old. Venus is the slowest rotating planet in the solar system

2

Black Holes

INTERSTELLAR THE TEAM OF ASTRONAUTS LAND ON A PLANET NEAR A BLACK HOLE. IN REALITY, THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN KILLED BY THE GAMMA RADIATION EMITTED FROM TH

1

Dark Matter

74% DARK ENERGY 22% DARK MATTER .6% INTERGALACTIC GAS 0.4% STARS. ETC. The whole universe as we know it, with all of its galaxies and billions of star

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