The universe is filled with lots of mysteries and stuff we can’t even imagine about. This are the 10 really crazy facts about the universe.
1. Twins Paradox
The twins paradox postulates that if you put one twin on a spaceship that was moving near the speed of light through space and left another one on Earth, due to the effects of relativity, the twin in the space ship would return to the planet significantly younger than his Earth bound sibling.
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2. Adding a nanosecond to your life
The force of gravity increases near the surface of the Earth, so does your acceleration which means exactly what you’re thinking – time slows down. Also, remember that since the earth is rotating, someone standing near the equator is moving faster than someone on the north pole.
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3. The Sun’s rays on your skin are 30,000 years old
We know that the light hitting Earth took 8 minutes to cross the 93 million miles between our skin and the surface of the Sun, did you know that the energy in those rays started their life over 30,000 years ago deep within the core of the sun? They were formed by an intense fusion reaction and spent most of those thousands of years making their way to the Sun’s surface.
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4. Lunar Drift
Each year scientists have determined that the moon moves about 3.8 cm further from the Earth. As a result, Earth’s spin has slowed by about .002 seconds every day over the course of the last century.
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5. Space Junk
Earth have over 8,000 objects orbiting around it. Most of these would be classified as “space junk” or debris left over from spacecraft and missions in the past.
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6. Earth has more than 1 moon
Okay, not really, they’re more like moon wannabes but scientists have discovered several asteroids that are more or less following the Earth as it moves around the sun.
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7. Saturn floats
As big as the planet Saturn is, if you were to put it in a glass of water, it would float. This is because its density is .687 grams per cm cubed while water’s is the famous .998 g per cm cubed.
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8. Venus’s day is longer than its year
Strangely enough Venus completes an entire orbit around the sun before it manages to turn on its axis once. This means that its day is actually longer than its year.
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9. Biggest Diamond Ever
In 2004 scientists discovered the largest diamond ever. In fact it’s a collapsed star. Measuring 4000 km across and having a core composed of 10 billion trillion trillion carats it’s roughly 50 light years from the Earth.
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10. The Moon smells like gunpowder
Upon leaving the moon astronauts on the Apollo missions described moon dust as smelling like gunpowder and feeling extremely soft.
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