Mind-Blowing Facts About Space

Less than 100 miles above our heads lies an unending universe which is vaster than we could ever comprehend. But it’s far from empty. Instead, it’s filled with incredible phenomena that our puny brains can barely grasp! Can you fathom the existence of things like stars within stars, planets made of diamonds, atom sized black holes, or even white holes? Before you space out, let me bring you back to Earth with some intel about the great, starry expanse that’ll really blow your mind.

The Earth Isn’t Round

You’ve probably seen photos of Earth taken from space, showing that our planet is undeniably round. But looks can be deceiving because that big blue marble isn’t a perfect sphere. And before all the flat-Earthers chime in, it isn’t a pancake either!

As the planet spins, it creates a centrifugal force that’s highest at the equator and almost nothing at its poles. Because the Earth’s mass is distributed unevenly within it, the force drags the equatorial section of the Earth outwards. That gives the Earth a slightly squashed appearance almost like someone accidentally sat on it! The effect, however, is small.

So small, that if you compared the diameter of Earth at the poles to the equator, you’d only see a 0.3% bigger, latitudinal bulge. Even so, that’s still a 26 mile hump, which is more than double the distance from the top of Mount Everest to the deepest part of the Mariana Trench!

The Sun Isn’t Burning

If any of you have been outside recently, you’ve probably felt the warm rays of the sun shining on your face. But despite the undeniable heat it gives out, the Sun, a giant ball of hot gas isn’t actually burning up. That’s because the term "burning" refers to a chemical reaction involving the rearrangement of electrons in an atom. So, the element itself does not change, but the arrangement of its electrons does.

However, our sun, which is composed primarily of hydrogen and helium gases, uses a process called nuclear fusion. That means instead of atoms being re-arranged, the very nature of the element changes. Instead of burning the hydrogen, the sun converts gargantuan quantities of it into helium and energy.

So much so, that it releases approximately 300 million tons of energy a minute, which’d be equivalent to exploding 100 billion tons of dynamite every second, according to NASA! But that immense reaction requires an astronomical amount of heat and pressure, kind of like a star sized pressure cooker.

Except the pressure in that pot is equal to 250 billion times that of Earth’s atmosphere, pushing the temperature at its core up to a staggering 30 million degrees Fahrenheit! It may not be burning, but a galactic kitchen producing that much heat, is certainly one to stay away from!

The Heaviest Thing In The Solar System

Even though it’s converting more and more of its finite fuel source into energy, the sun is still the heaviest thing in our solar system. And not by any small amount! It holds a whopping 99.85% of the solar systems entire mass. In comparison, all 8 planets combined make up a measly 0.135%!

But if it’s made up of gases like hydrogen and helium, how can lightweight fumes outweigh good old fashioned solids? The soul crushing pressure making up the red hot gas ball condenses most of the particles of the gas together at its core.

Though the core makes up just 2% of its entire volume, it has a density which is about 15 times that of lead. That means it makes up an astonishing half of the sun’s overall mass! So, while it only has a diameter that’s 109 times that of the Earth, it weighs approximately 333,000 times more!

R136a1: The Heaviest Star In The Universe

Our sun may be incredibly heavy, but if it was preparing for a physical fight against the other stars in our universe, it’d be dumped in the lightweight category! Across the ring, sat at the top of the super heavy weight roster would be the colossal, yet uninspiringly named, R136a1.

Though it doesn’t sound super imposing, that giant star is estimated to weigh 315 times that of our sun. For some perspective, that’s almost 105 million Earths! But what is it that gives that star its super weighty edge? Well, if you were to train your telescopes about 163,000 light years from Earth, you’d be able to feast your eyes on the horrifyingly named Tarantula Nebula.

There, you’d see a brightly glowing Wolf-Rayet Star. It’s a rare class of star that carries huge amounts of ionized helium, carbon, and nitrogen. It’s the super heavy elements that give the giant star its unimaginable mass and intense glow. So intense, that if it were compared side by side to our sun, it would outshine it as much as our sun outshines the moon! Against R136a1, our sun really has no weight in this competition!

UY Scuti: The Biggest Star In The Universe

R136a1 may be incredibly heavy, but it’s actually quite small; with a diameter just 35 times bigger than our sun, it’s more like the Michelle to the universe’s Beyoncé! And while Beyoncé may be the biggest star in the world, UY Scuti is the biggest star known to man! It’s so mind-glowingly large that when compared to our sun on a computer screen it barely takes up one pixel.

But if it’s so big, how come we’re not being constantly blinded by it? Fortunately for our eyes, it’s situated in the Milky Way galaxy’s Scutum constellation, around 5,219 light years from Earth. But even though it’s so far away, its incredible size makes it stand out from the small cluster of stars it’s surrounded by. That’s because UY Scuti tops out the tape measure with a radius that’s a staggering 1,700 times larger than that of our sun’s.

That gives it a diameter of almost 1.47 billion miles across! So, even if you were to travel at rocket speed which is a breakneck 4.9 miles a second, it would still take you almost a decade to pass through! Or if you prefer land vehicles a non-stop, 50 mph road trip would see you reach the other side in an inconceivable 3371 years!

Planet Nine

If you were to travel beyond all the known planets in our solar system, you’d come to a cold, dark point in space known as the Kuiper belt. Unlike the neat, circular orbits of our planets, large objects in the Kuiper belt have trajectories that seem a little lopsided at best!

While they all still orbit the sun, you can see the most distant objects all swing out awkwardly in one direction. But according to the principles of astrophysics, that unevenness should be for lack of a better word, impossible.

However, scientists recently theorized that their crooked trajectories could make sense. That is, if there’s a huge, undiscovered planet swinging in the opposite direction, balancing them out. According to their calculations, that 9th planet would need to be about 10 times the mass of Earth!

Considering its size, you might be wondering why we haven’t already spotted it through our telescopes, but that can be explained by its mind boggling orbit. For perspective, the furthest known planet from our sun is Neptune, at a staggering 2.8 billion miles away, circling the sun once every 165 years.

But Planet 9’s orbit would be 20 times that distance, taking an astronomical 10,000-20,000 years to make a single trip around the sun! But without any concrete images from satellites or telescopes, that phantom planet remains purely theoretical.

How Many Stars Are In The Milky Way?

Counting every single star in the sky sounds like an endless task. But with a little math, it’s not too hard to figure out just how long that astronomical mission would take you. Let’s start at a galaxy level, our own to be precise!

Some calculations indicate our Milky Way galaxy holds between 100 to 400 billion stars. Using that as a jumping off point, next we need to figure out how many galaxies are in the universe. Seeing as we don’t know how big the universe really is, that is a colossal question.

However, one astronomer named David Kornreich has proposed a rough estimate of around a staggering 10 trillion different galaxies! Multiply that by our 100 billion stars per galaxy estimate, and you get approximately 1 septillion stars, that’s a 1 with 24 zeros and a lot of stardust trailing behind it.

So, now that we have a number, how long do you think it would take you to count every single star in the sky? Assuming you counted one a second, it would take you over thirty one quadrillion years to pinpoint them all! As impossible as that mission sounds, I think we just discovered what the most mind-melting job at NASA might be.

Supernovas

As ethereal as they look, stars don’t last forever. And when they die, they go out with a real bang! Those astronomical explosions are called supernovas. They involve massive stars, at least eight times the mass of our own sun, that consume huge amounts of hydrogen at their cores. The energy that produces generates an intense, outward pressure which prevents the star from collapsing under its own colossal gravity.

But when the star runs out of fuel, gravity finally wins against the pressure, and the star collapses in on itself! It happens so suddenly, that it would be like watching something a million times the mass of Earth collapse in just 15 seconds! As you can see from this NASA animation below, the shockwaves this produces blast apart the outer layer of the doomed star!

Animation: The Early Flash of an Exploding Star, Caught by Kepler by NASA's Ames Research Center

But unlike you may have imagined they don’t always explode so spherically. For proof, just take a look at Supernova 1987A below, located around 160,000 light years from Earth.

After it exploded in 1987, researchers were astonished to find that instead of the spherical burst they’d expected, the blast had been faster and stronger in different directions! That has left the resulting starburst looking like a bow tie from one direction, and the eye of Sauron from another!

Black Holes

While the remnants of some supernovae look otherworldly, others can leave behind something truly nightmare inducing. If the remaining stellar cores of enormous, exploded stars no longer have the outward force of heat pressure opposing their gravity, then the core collapses in on itself. That impossible sounding occurrence is what we know as a Black Hole.

However, it’s not the same as watching a building collapse. Because as the star caves in on itself, its rapidly reducing surface approaches a point called "The Event Horizon". That is the threshold where the speed needed to escape the gravity of the collapsing star surpasses the speed of light.

Black Holes 101 | National Geographic by National Geographic

That means anything travelling under 186 thousand miles per second is dragged in and consumed by that ever-collapsing gravity well! Without light, time around it slows to the rate that is kept by its observers. So, that means it’s an infinitely collapsing object, forever frozen in time!

But what, exactly, do they look like? You’ve probably seen films where black holes are portrayed as planet sized voids, but what if I told you they can get much, much bigger than that? Well, sat 10.4 billion light years away in the Abell 85 cluster, the black hole known as TON 618 is calculated to have a mass 66 billion times that of our sun.

And with great mass comes great size, meaning that black hole has a world ending diameter of over 242 billion miles! For perspective, that’s 2,606 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun, it’s no wonder it falls into the ominously named "ultra massive black hole" category. But if that incomprehensible scale blows your mind a little too hard, then shift your attention to the other end of the size spectrum.

Unlike stars, black holes have no limit to how small they can be. With that said, scientists believe a black hole can be as small as a single atom, the smallest unit of ordinary matter that exists. But even at that size, a black hole would have a relative mass that’s as large as a mountain!

White Holes

While black holes hog all the limelight, their neglected twin White Holes barely get any airtime at all! That’s right, white holes are, as the name suggests, the theoretical opposites of black holes. As I previously mentioned, black holes have gravitational boundaries that can stop just about anything from escaping.

After some physicists fiddled with the math's back in the 1970’s, they concluded that an opposite entity could exist that prevents anything from entering instead. So, while a black hole gobbles up matter, a white hole spews matter out. It’d be an incredibly bright and energetic object, hurling energy into the depths of space at an astounding rate.

But how on Earth would they form? Thankfully, not on Earth. All roads of that theory point to them forming in the reverse of their black hole brethren. So, instead of collapsing in on themselves, a super dense singularity would vomit up matter until it assembled itself into a star.

However, that violates several fundamental rules of physics, and seeing as no white holes have been spotted in the known universe, they remain purely theoretical. Saying that, black holes were also just a theory until 1971 and that was only about 50 years ago! Maybe in the next 50, a rogue white hole will shed some light on the matter!

Diamond Rain

In some parts of the world, rain is incredibly precious. But on the outer planets of our system, it’s priceless not because it’s rare, but because it literally rains diamonds! That incredible occurrence starts in the atmospheres of gas giants, like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. All four planets have atmospheres that contain high quantities of methane.

During lightning storms, the electrical energy converts the methane into soot, which clumps together and hardens into chunks of graphite. As the chunks get heavier, they’re dragged down by the planet’s gravity and into the ever increasing pressure of its atmosphere.

While they fall, the carbon atoms are compressed into incredibly sized diamonds, with some of the largest measuring about a centimeter in diameter! On planets like Saturn, those storms are so frequent that around 1,100 tons of those dazzling stones drop to the surface every year.

55 Cancri e: The Diamond Planet

When it comes to planets boasting copious amounts of diamonds, the previously mentioned gas giants can all step aside for 55 Cancri e. After the discovery of the "Super Earth" in the Cancri constellation back in 2004, scientists began analyzing its composition. They estimated that the carbon abundant planet had a mass 8 times greater than Earth, with a radius only twice as wide.

The discrepancy meant that the planet must be made of dense carbon compounds, like graphite and extraordinarily diamond. But it wasn’t just a few necklaces worth. Scientists theorize that a thick layer of pure diamond coats the planet’s inner layers, making up a staggering third of its mass!

In fact, if it were to be valued on its diamond content alone, it’d probably be worth approximately $26.9 nonillion, that’s $26.9 followed by 29 zeros! Although it sounds like an ultra wealthy utopia, there’s nothing cool about it! In fact, the temperature of the surface reaches a flesh melting 3,900 degrees Fahrenheit. The inhospitable environment makes that planet an extra terrestrial diamond in the rough!

Saturn's Hexagon

At school, you probably learned that the most amazing feature of Saturn was its stunning set of rings. But if you look closer, you’ll see an even more mind blowing side to that planet or 6 to be precise. At the North Pole of that serene looking gas giant, a huge, hexagonal storm is constantly raging.

It was first discovered in 1988 in footage from the Voyager probes, and additional visits from the Cassini probe in 2004 have revealed inconceivable details about the six sided storm. From thermal images, researchers estimate it’s about 20,000 miles wide and 60 miles deep, with winds whipping around at approximately 220 mph!

Saturn's Hexagon - Cassini Capturs Jet Stream In Action | Video by VideoFromSpace

But how do all those elements fit together to produce a perfect polygon? After all, the universe doesn’t normally build in such straight lines! Using all that information, researchers attempted to recreate the oddly shaped storm in computer simulations.

By adding in small perturbations to the planet’s eastward air flow around the North Pole, they found the currents jostled with one another and meandered into a hexagonal shape! The universe wasn’t cutting any corners when it whipped up that phenomenon.

Aurora Borealis

Like waves of emerald green ribbons, the lights of the Aurora Borealis dance across the nights sky. Even though those delights to the eyes are best seen at night, they’re caused by the sun. The green swathes form when solar winds which are high speed, electrified particles released by the sun, collide with the Earth’s magnetic field. Some of the particles travel down the magnetic field lines into the Earth’s geomagnetic poles.

Space Weather and Earth's Aurora by NASA Video

There, the particles get trapped and start to collide with atoms in our atmosphere, releasing energy in the form of light. Oxygen releases red and green light, while hydrogen and helium atoms glow purple and blue.

But Auroras aren’t just something that happen on Earth. In fact, those solar winds can also reach far away planets like Jupiter! Using an ultraviolet camera, the Hubble telescope was able to capture the gas giant’s immensely active auroras back in 2016.

Hubble Tracks Bright Auroras on Jupiter by NASA Video

That is because Jupiter’s magnetic field is 20,000 times stronger than Earth’s, making its auroras so expansive they can cover areas larger than our entire planet! And it’s not just Jupiter that outshines Earth in the aurora arena!

Saturn also sports some brilliant aurora ribbons around its poles. Captured through Hubble’s ultraviolet lens in 2018, those appear to be blue. However, previous data collected from the Cassini probe indicated that, to the human eye, those ribbons actually look red and purple!

Thorne Żytkow Theory: Supergiant Stars Swallowing Dead Stars

You’d think the universe was big enough for every star to have plenty of space. But according to the Thorne Żytkow theory, some stars have no personal boundaries. Instead, they exist inside other, larger stars like Russian nesting dolls! As impossible as it looks, there are two main theories that can explain that phenomenon.

It begins with a binary system, where two stellar bodies are gravitationally tied together. The more massive of the two stars explodes into a supernova, leaving a tiny, ultra dense remnant called a neutron star. Over time, the remaining stellar body evolves into a red supergiant and slowly expands. If it does, the neutron star will spiral into the supergiant’s center, where it will sit in the hot gaseous shell of its host, a bit like a cosmic parasite.

Another scenario theorizes that the energy from an explosive supernova could propel the neutron star into the red supergiant. Kind of like kicking a soccer ball into a goal. If the ball weighed as much as 2 suns, and if the goal was a scorching 7,640 degrees Fahrenheit. God have mercy on that poor goalkeeper!

Sunset On Other Planets

In 2015, the Curiosity Rover sent back photos of a blue skied sunset on Mars. But during the day those same skies are orange, it’s the exact opposite of Earth! So, how on Earth (well, Mars) does that work?

The sky on Earth is blue because of the molecules that make up our atmosphere. They partially block the sunlight and scatter it across the sky. But they’re much better at scattering blue light’s shorter wavelengths than red light’s longer wavelengths. However, during a sunset, the sunlight travels through so much atmosphere that most of the blue light is scattered away, leaving behind awe inspiring reds or oranges!

However, it works a little differently on Mars. The red planet has a much thinner atmosphere that is filled with iron oxide dust more commonly known as rust. It’s that dust that gives the planet its distinctive red color!

During the day, red light is scattered through those particles, making the sky seem red or orange. But at dusk, the dust’s density scatters most of the red light away. That means the shorter wavelengths of blue light can pierce through, giving the setting sun that incredible indigo halo!

So, sunsets look pretty cool through different atmospheres, unless you’re stuck on Venus. That hellishly volcanic planet has an atmosphere that’s so thick that you can’t even see the sun through it! To prove it, in 1981 the soviet Venera probe sent back some images from the surface of Venus, one of them is attached below.

The sky is a toxic shade of yellow, thanks to all the carbon dioxide and sulphuric acid clouds clogging up the atmosphere. So, a sunset on Venus would look something a bit like turning a dimmer switch down in the world’s most garishly painted room!

But what about planets without any atmosphere at all, like Mercury? Without any molecules to scatter the light, the sky would actually appear a lot like the sky on our moon. That is to say, completely black, both day and night!

I hope you were amazed at these mind-blowing space facts! Thanks for reading.