When you think about it the very fact you are alive is a fantastic achievement. Everything that has ever happened since time began needed to happen exactly how it did for us to be born. Amazing right? The universe is incredibly big and mysterious, so Buzzfeed has put together a video that is full of mind-blowing facts and info about the planet, the sun, the solar system, the universe, the galaxy, and more.
The universe is maybe one of the greatest enigmas that humanity will never solve. Everything around us has always been a mystery, and as humans advanced as a civilization tighter, the realized how little we know about where we are located in space.
The universe expands at a staggering rate of approximately 43 miles per second per MEGAPRASEC. It is even hard to imagine how fast this is.
In comparisons, the farthest space probe from Earth, the Voyager 1, is traveling about a million miles a day, and after almost 40 years, the spacecraft has barely left the solar system.
However, everything is in movement; nothing is static.
As you're reading this, the Earth revolves around its axis; it orbits the sun, while the sun moves through space at a whopping 792,000 kilometers per hour around the galactic center, and the universe moves at a mind-bending 2.1 million kilometers per hour.
A new study which was not so long ago published in Nature Astronomy described a previously UNKNOWN, supermassive region in our extragalactic neighborhood mostly empty of galaxies, which is exerting a REPELLING FORCE on our local group of galaxies. Experts had previously thought that the milky way galaxy was being pulled by strong gravitational forces.
A new study has shown differently, however.
It turns out; the Milky Way is being pushed across the universe by a so-called EXTRAGALACTIC VOID, in a process scientists call a kind of galactic tug-of-war, at an insane speed of 1.2 Million miles per hour.
It was not until recently that scientists managed to understand where we are located in space. According to what astronomers, The Laniakea Supercluster is the galaxy supercluster which is home to the Milky Way and 100,000 other nearby galaxies. The Laniakea Supercluster encompasses 100,000 galaxies stretched out more than 160 megaparsecs (520 million light-years). It has the approximate mass of 1017 solar masses or a hundred thousand times that of our galaxy, that's almost the same as that of the Horologium Supercluster. It consists of 4 subparts, which were known previously as separate superclusters.
Nevertheless, that’s small if you zoom out further away. There are approximately ten billion galaxies in the observable universe! The number of stars in a galaxy varies, yet assuming an average of 100 billion stars per galaxy means there are around 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (that’s 1 billion trillion) stars in the observable universe.
If you're having a tough day, this is sure to put your problems into perspective and cheer you up. Enjoy!
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