7 Fun Facts About the Universe That Will Blow Your Mind

When you look up into the night sky, you see a bunch of beautiful dots. These dots are stars planets and more. And of course, with the help of technology, we can see even more than that. But even with the highest tech, we can only see 5% of space.

The universe is made of three things: ordinary matter and particles, dark matter, and dark energy. Ordinary matter and particles are about 5% of everything, which is visible to us.

Dark matter takes up 27% of space but doesn’t reflect, absorb, or radiate light, so we can’t detect anything, and scientists aren’t really sure what dark matter truly is. Lastly, dark energy comprises roughly 68% of the universe, but scientists know even less about this than they do with dark matter. We just know that dark energy is there because it has to explain the universe’s accelerating expansion.

So basically, to sum it up, there is only 5% of the universe that we can see, and the rest is darkness that no one can really explain what it is.

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We all know Pluto. The beautiful planet discovered in 1930 was recently kicked out of the group in 2006 after research believed that other objects might cross its orbit.

Now reclassified as a dwarf planet, many of us are still a bit angry that Pluto is no longer part of our little family. But even so, it might be interesting to realize just how small Pluto really is.

One of the many fun facts about the universe is that Pluto is smaller than the United States. Pluto is only about 1,400 miles wide, which is only about half the width of the United States. If you were to walk around the equator of Pluto, it would be about the same distance as walking from London to Denver.

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It’s nice to think about space in a calm and peaceful way. That is until you learn about the songs of space. Overall, space is quiet. That’s because most regions of space are a vacuum, so there are no molecules of liquid, solid, or gas to agitate the hairs and bones in our ears to cause the vibrations that make sound.

The quiet regions are particularly in interstellar and intergalactic space. Within galaxies and nebulae, there are huge, swirling clouds of gas and dust that are capable of making sound.

Along with that, some planets actually emit sound. Scientists converted the radio emissions collected across the various missions into sound waves, so you can hear the sounds emitted by some of these planets.

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You’ve heard of black holes, but what about white holes? Black holes are basically a region of spacetime wherein gravity is so strong that no matter or electromagnetic energy can escape it. When it comes to white holes, however, no one has found one, yet according to mathematics, white holes are possible.

Think about the creation of a black hole, where a massive star dies and the immense weight crushes into its core, triggering the creation of a black hole. Take this theory, and reverse it. A white hole is essentially an area that cannot be entered from the outside, although energy-matter, light, and information can escape from it. It appears in the theory of eternal black holes.

It would act like a black hole, attracting objects to it, but unlike a black hole, objects falling toward a white hole would never actually reach the white hole’s event horizon. For instance, a gravitation field, but without a surface. Scary right?

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Want to be freaked out a bit? One of the terrifying, yet fun facts about the universe are rogue planets. If you’re ever worried about a meteor coming along one day and hitting us, then you’re in for a treat.

Rogue planets are exactly what you might think, they’re free-floating planets or an isolated planetary-mass object that is not bound by any gravitational pull to a star or brown dwarf. Essentially, these are planets freely roaming through space.

These planets may originate from a planetary system and then later ejected, or they can form on their own outside a system. The Milky Way alone may have billions or trillions of rogue planets. While the chance of one bumping against us might be slim, it’s still a terrifying thought.

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These fun facts about the universe keep getting weirder and weirder. For instance, in 2015, gravitational waves were detected on Earth for the first time. And it came from something that nobody predicted: A binary black hole system.

The system consists of two black holes in close orbit around one another. For years, proving the existence of binary black holes was difficult because of the nature of black holes themselves and the limited means of detection available.

With every galaxy having a supermassive black hole at its center, it was a long-time theory that binary black hole systems were possible. It was a rare sight, and some believe that the two black holes could have been remnants of the very first generation of stars, or even primordial black holes, born in the inferno of the Big Bang itself.

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Once again, the idea that we’re unique is back. But it’s true. Not only are we, as far as we know, the only habitable planet, but our solar system is special.

One of the best fun facts about the universe is that solar systems are different from ours as they are super-compact, meaning planets tend to orbit closer to their parent star. with that, our solar system is a bit of a mess.

Other solar systems have planets that are more equal in size compared to ours and are more evenly spaced apart. But even with all this information, it’s still unknown what makes this solar system so unique compared to the rest.