The Universe: 5 Mind-Blowing Facts You Need to Know

KOMPAS.com – The universe is everything that includes all of space, all the matter and energy contained in space. In fact, time and, of course, we are included in the universe.

The Earth and Moon are part of the universe, as are the other planets. Apart from asteroids and comets, planets also orbit the Sun.

The Sun is one of hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, most of which have their own planets, known as exoplanets.

The Milky Way is just one of billions of galaxies in the observable universe. All the stars in all the galaxies and everything else that astronomers can’t even observe are part of the universe.

Also read: How Big is the Universe?

Facts about the universe

Here are some interesting facts about the universe we live in:

1. 95% of the universe is invisible

There is a very amazing discovery, namely that everything that science has studied for the last 350 years is only a small contaminant in the universe.

Only about 4.9% of the mass energy of the universe is in the form of atoms (the materials that make up us, stars and galaxies).

About 26.8% of the cosmic mass energy is invisible dark matter. This is revealed because dark matter exerts its gravitational pull on visible matter.

Candidates for dark matter include subatomic particles, as yet unknown, and black holes that formed during the Big Bang.

Also read: Are There White Holes in the Universe?

However, apart from dark matter, there is dark energy which contributes 68.3% of the mass energy of the universe. This energy is invisible, it fills all space and accelerates cosmic expansion.

2. There is a supermassive black hole at the heart of every galaxy

Active galaxies often emit 100 times more light than normal galaxies. With the discovery of quasars in 1963, it was clear that light did not originate from stars but from the smaller central region of the solar system.

The only conceivable source of energy is matter heated to the point of glowing as it spirals into a giant black hole whose mass is up to 50 billion times the mass of the Sun.

In the 1990s, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope discovered that, although active galaxies make up only about 1% of all galaxies, supermassive black holes are not an anomaly.

Almost every galaxy, including the Milky Way, has one, but due to a lack of “food” supplies, most of these black holes have died.

Also read: Diamond Rain Often Occurs in the Universe, Where?

3. Most objects in the universe have repulsive gravity

The universe continues to expand, its constituent galaxies scattering like cosmic debris after the Big Bang. The only force at work is gravity, which acts like an elastic web between the galaxies.

However, in 1998, contrary to all expectations, astronomers discovered that the expansion of the universe was actually accelerating.

To explain it, they postulated the existence of an invisible object, which they called dark energy, which fills space and has repulsive gravity. The gravitational repulsion of dark energy is what accelerates cosmic expansion.

4. Most planetary systems are different from the solar system

The discovery of planets around other stars, at last count more than 3,500 have been confirmed, has seriously baffled experts. The reason is, there is no system like the solar system.

There is a very compact planetary system, all of which orbit closer to their host star than Mercury, the innermost planet in the Solar System, does to the Sun.

Also read: The Most Distant Supermassive Black Holes Are Almost As Old As The Universe

There are also planets with a mass the size of Jupiter which must be migrating inward. There are planets whose orbits are very elliptical, similar to comets. There are also planets that orbit their stars in the wrong way.

Considering that the planets were believed to be frozen due to gas and dust rotating in the same direction around the newborn sun, this latest discovery is very difficult to explain.

Until now, no one knows whether the strangeness of our solar system has anything to do with humanity’s awareness of it.

5. Apparently, humans are not alone

There are about 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe, and probably more planets than stars.

However, in the midst of the vastness of the universe, so far, there is only one place where we know there is life, namely Planet Earth.

Despite intelligent signal searches, no signs of extraterrestrial life have been found. In fact, there is a strong argument that if such life forms were out there, not only would we see signs of them but they should already be here.

However, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It took humans three billion years to go from single cells to complex life, which suggests that taking this step is difficult.

It is important to remember that technological civilizations like the ones humans have today may be rare and short-lived; humans may have missed another million or billion of years. Meanwhile, the other alternative is that the closest one may be too far for us to detect.

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2024-01-31 09:36:00
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