10 Mind Bending Facts about the Universe

1. The universe contains around 50,000,000,000 galaxies each of which has between 100,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000 stars

2. At the speed of light, time stops

3. Dark matter makes up 83% of the matter in the universe . . . but we can’t see it and we don’t know what it is.

4. Time passes more slowly in orbit around the earth . . . meaning returning astronauts arrive home slightly younger than if they had spent the same amount of time on earth

5. Atoms are 99.9999999999999% empty space . . . meaning all matter making up the entire human race could fit into a sugar cube

6. Just a thimbleful of a neutron star would weigh over 100 million tons

7. Sagittarius 3, an interstellar gas cloud . . . contains a billion, billion, billion liters of alcohol

8. The most powerful explosions ever witnessed in the universe . . . are gamma-ray bursts – they are trillions of times brighter than our sun

9. In Quantum Physics causality can work backwards. Our choices in the present can effectively determine what occurred in the past.

10. According to some models of cosmology there are an infinite number of universes . . . with an infinite number of people reading this list.