FACTS ABOUT OUR UNIVERSE

Even When You’re Standing Still, You’re Still Moving

A human body, or any object on the Earth, is never at rest. Even when you’re asleep in bed, you’re moving pretty fast. Our Milky Way Galaxy is rotating at 225 kilometers per second, and hurling through the cosmos at an estimated 305 kilometers per second. Add those figures together, and we’re racing through space at around 530 kilometers, or 330 miles per second. So in one minute’s time, you’ve  traveled almost 20,000 kilometers, or more than 12,000 miles. And your friends always complain that you never go anywhere.

There Are at Least 10 Billion Trillion Stars in the Universe

That’s a very big number. When you really think about it, 10 billion trillion stars makes the cult of sun worship seem a little obsolete, although our star, the sun, is very important to us. Without it, life on earth wouldn’t be possible.

Let’s put 10 billion trillion stars into perspective, shall we? For those of you who know a bit of math, that would be 10 to the power of 22 stars, or written out, it would be 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. There are probably more stars in existence than grains of sand on all of the world’s beaches. If only 1% of those stars had Earth-like planets, the universe would literally be teeming with life.

One Million Earths Could Fit Inside The Sun

Even though there are a lot of stars out there, none is more important to us than our own sun. When compared to other stars, it’s fairly small, classified as a G2 dwarf star. But that doesn’t mean we’re complaining. Approximately one million Earths could fit inside this dwarf star. It might not be the largest star in the universe, but it gets the job done as far as sustaining life on Earth goes.

Our Galaxy Is on a Collision Course with the Andromeda Galaxy

The Milky Way Galaxy, which is to say our very own galaxy, is on a collision course with our nearest neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy. Even though these two conglomerations of stars are destined to smash together, you shouldn’t lose any sleep over the incident. The impending impact won’t happen for another 3 billion years. The chances of you being around for that galactic “fender bender” are pretty slim, unless you’re planning to cryogenically freeze yourself or something.

The Earth Is Billions of Years Old

Our planet has been around for quite some time. It’s been around, in fact, for about 4.54 billion years, give or take 0.02 billion years. Life has only been on the planet for a short amount of time, but the variety of life that has crawled, slithered, swam and trod upon the planet is pretty spectacular — from single celled organisms, to giant sharks and snakes, to dinosaurs, to mammals. If that comet coming in 2029 (and again, in 2036) misses the planet, hopefully we’ll thrive here for a long time to come.