62 Facts About The Universe And Space That Sound Completely Impossible But Are Actually True

The nearest star is so far away that if the voyager II (the fastest and further away ship we have) was headed to it, it would take 82 THOUSAND years to get there.

From a photon's "point of view" time and distance are zero.
(Photons cannot really have a POV since they don't have a rest frame.)
So a photon emitted by a star a billion years ago would be absorbed by your eye with no time passing in between.

Every single electron in the universe is perfectly identical. They don't have variations in size, mass, or electric charge.

The universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, which seems impossible but is backed by evidence.

The energetic phase of the universe’s existence will be much, much shorter than the amount of time that will pass when all particles in existence are so distant from one another that interaction between them is impossible.

All the billions of stars, galaxies and everything in them are literally just very fleeting sparks in an almost unimaginably vast expanse of time.

Amost everything we know about objects we can never visit comes from tiny signals: photon.

A photon can leave a distant galaxy billions of years ago, cross an almost unimaginable expanse of space, and eventually hit a detector on Earth. From that tiny piece of information - thanks to the efforts of researchers - we are able to infer the galaxy's composition, motion, temperature, age, and sometimes even the presence of objects we cannot see.

We essentially reconstruct the universe from clues that have travelled across it to find us. I work with this data everyday yet it never fails to awe me.

Mass does not create gravity by bending space-time.

The space-time actually IS bent and we call the result mass and gravity.

Also there ist no matter in the universe. It is all just energy interacting on different levels. "Solid" ist just our description for the strong forces coupling the dots of energy (quarks, electrons).

So basically the universe ist just bent space-time, creating "mass" on one side of the medal and "energy" on the other. There is even a formular describing the connection. ;-).

Some "95%" factoids :

95% of stars that have, or ever will be born have already been born. We are at the end of the age of star formation.


95% of all the stars / galaxies we can see are forever unreachable, even if we could travel at the speed of light due to the expansion of space.


95% of all the mass-energy in the universe is dark. All the light from all the stars and galaxies we see only make up 5 percent of the universe.

Black holes are the universe’s existential panic attacks, screaming so loudly that even light gets scared and freezes. They are cosmic vacuum cleaners with no off switch, running on a diet of pure time and regret. If you fell into one, you would be stretched into a single noodle of spaghetti, proving that the laws of physics ultimately prefer Italian cuisine over human geometry.

Time dilation and length contraction are like two sides of the same coin. 

Observer sees the rocket on its way to Andromeda blasting past at 99 percent C and observes their time moving so slow its almost stopped.

Crew on the rocket time moves normally but due to length contraction arrive almost instantly. The rocket
 turns around and returns  to Earth again almost instantly, but the observer who saw them depart is
millions of years d**d.

Orbital speed fact:

Orbit basically means 'travel sideways so fast that even though you are always falling, the horizon falls as fast as you do.'

The International Space Station (or any other body in stable low earth orbit) travels so fast that in the time it takes a rifle bullet to cross a cricket pitch (~20 metres from one wicket to the other), the ISS would have crossed the entire stadium, grandstand, oval and all.

A meteor shower is most often the result of earth passing through the tail debris of a comet.

When we observe a photon from the CMB we are observing a photon produced in the youth of the Universe, billions of years ago. However, from the reference frame of this photon, it was just created and literally no time has passed for it.

There is no scientific proof of passage of time. Time exists as a coordinate, but there isn't a single formula or experiment that can prove that time actually flows. It's just how we perceive it.

We have no clue what ~95% of the observable universe is made out of.

There is no true "now" in time. Now has no universal meaning. It makes no sense to even ask what is happening "now" in the Andromeda galaxy.

We're closer to the size of the observable universe than to the Planck length.

That even the known universe is much much bigger than the Big Bang Theory suggests it should be per the math. It is roughly 95-100 billion light years from side to side & it should be, in "reality", about two thirds that size. There are so many awesome things like this btw, unexplainable to our ken.

People often underestimate distances in astronomy. The moon is so far from the Earth, you could put all the planets of our solar system between.

Also the evening star is actually Venus.

Here's something fun.

The Speed of the Universe and space itself expanding, is faster than the *speed of light itself* at this point.

If you want an explanation for this just ask, I can explain this one.