Our universe can be an extraordinary, yet very strange place. Everything from science to stardust — the extraordinary and the ordinary — is present in our universe. And guess what? YOU are part of this infinitely beautiful creation.
Every day there are groundbreaking ideas in quantum theory and new discoveries across the universe. While science continues to investigate farther and farther into distant galaxies, there are still elements around you that might be hard to believe. So, we will take a look at just a few examples.
When you start to think about life and the universe, many questions probably come to mind. What is in space? What is stardust made of? What are we made of? While we don’t have the answers to all of these questions, there are many interesting facts about the Universe that we do know. Here are just a few of them:
- Russia has approximately the same surface area as the dwarf planet, Pluto.
- It rains diamonds on Jupiter and Saturn.
- If you could squeeze the Earth and condense it into the size of a marble, it would be so dense that it would become a black hole and collapse into itself.
- The universe is defined as flat.
- If you like raspberries and rum, you will love the center of our galaxy, because that’s what it smells like.
- It is believed that the universe began with The Big Bang, which is said to have taken place 13.8 billion years ago.
- Imagine that the sun is the size of a white blood cell. That would mean the Milky Way Galaxy would be the size of the U.S.A.
- There are 10 times more stars in space than there are grains of sand on every beach or desert in the world.
- “The human body is about 60% water, and hydrogen only accounts for 11% of that water mass. Even though water consists of two hydrogen atoms for every oxygen, hydrogen has much less mass. We can conclude that 93% of the mass in our body is stardust,” according to Physics Central. This means that there is a universe inside the human body and we are made of star stuff!
- We genuinely are extraordinary creatures. Our eyes alone are made up of 130 million photoreceptor cells; in each of those cells are 100 trillion (100,000,000,000,000) atoms. It took more atoms than all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy to complete a single human eye.
- The molecules in each cell of the body were formed billions and billions of years ago. So how are humans made? Even though we know the science of procreation, the origins of stardust (the substance of which we are made) is not entirely clear. Nonetheless, the cells in your body come from the heart of the stars we look at each night.
So, the next time you’re feeling down or insignificant, just remember that it took everything — from science to stardust — almost an eternity to bring you into existence. And that’s not something to take lightly!
