The Universe

"Do there exist many worlds, or is there but a single world? This is one of the
most noble and exalted questions in the study of nature."- St. Albertus Magnus
(ca. 1193-1280)

There are an estimated 50 thousand million galaxies in the universe, with the
typical galaxy containing 50 thousand million to 100 thousand million stars. It
is estimated that there are 1022 stars in total in the universe. (source)

We have not observed a supernova in the Milky Way galaxy since the
invention of the telescope. Supernovae were recorded in 1572 and 1604, while
Hans Lippershey invented the telescope in 1608 and Galileo first used the
telescope to observe the heavens in 1609.

The telescope was invented in 1608 when spectacle-maker Hans Lippershey's

apprentice was playing games. The apprentice was amusing himself with lenses
and found a combination that made things seem closer. When Lippershey was
shown this combination, he enclosed the lenses at two ends of a tube. (source)

The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was the first person to propose
that what we now call galaxies lay outside the Milky Way and were indeed
galaxies (or "island universes", as Kant called them) in their own
right. [ Philosophy and Religion | Firsts | The Universe ]

As late as 1820, the universe was thought by European scientists to be 6,000

years old. It is now thought to be about 13,700,000,000 years old.
[ Misconceptions | The Universe ] (source)

The Earth is rotating on its axis at a rate of 460 metres per second at the
equator, and is orbiting the sun at a rate of about 30 kilometres per second. The
sun is orbiting the centre of the Milky Way at a rate of about 220 kilometres per
second. The Milky Way is moving at a speed of about 1000 kilometres per
second towards a region of space 150 million light years away called the Great
Attractor. (source)

It is possible that many planets in the galaxy may not orbit around stars. Recent
work by Kailash Sahu found six gravitational lenses in the star cluster M22
from objects smaller than brown dwarfs, the smallest type of star. Only one
gravitational lensing event by a star was found in the same work.
The Large Zenith Telescope (LZT), located near Vancouver, has a mirror made
out of mercury. The telescope features 28 litres of mercury in a pan which
spins, causing the mercury to assume a parabolic shape. The telescope only cost
$500,000, about 1/100th as much as a similarly-sized telescope with a glass mirror
would cost. Its main disadvantage is that it can only look straight up - otherwise
the poisonous mercury would spill.

A "light year" is a measure of distance, not time. It is defined as the distance

light travels in one year. Light moves at a velocity of about 300,000 kilometres
each second, so in one year, it travels about 9,500,000,000,000 kilometres.
[ Physics and Physicists | The Universe | Numbers and Measurement ] (source)

While astronomers used to believe that galaxies were distributed more or less
evenly through space, they have now found regions where galaxies are rare or
absent. The largest of these regions is located in the direction of the
constellation Bootes, and measures more than 300 million light years across.

The matter in the universe is so thinly dispersed that the universe can be
compared with a building twenty miles long, twenty miles wide, and twenty
miles high, containing only a single grain of sand.

The term "Big Bang" started as a putdown. In the 1940's, there were many
competing theories about the nature of the universe. British astrophysicist Fred
Hoyle coined the term "Big Bang" as a snide putdown of his competitors, only
to have the term find its way into the general consciousness as the description
of the correct theory. (source)

A massive star has a shorter lifetime than a less massive star. The more massive
a star, the more tightly its gravity pulls it together, the hotter it must be to keep
it from collapsing, and the more rapidly it uses up its hydrogen fuel. The reason
there are so few really massive stars is that they do not live very long, as little
as a million years. For comparison, our sun has an expected lifetime of about
11,000 million years.

Can you hear in space? In theory, if there is nothing to receive the sound, there
is no sound. Because there are no "air waves" in space to conduct the sound, it
would not carry. So, the object would make a noise, but it would not carry to
any receiver, and no one would hear it. [ Physics and Physicists | The
Universe ] (source)

About 25% of the universe consists of "dark matter", and about 70% consists of
"dark energy", leaving only about 5% of the universe visible to us. (source)
The word arctic is derived from the ancient Greek word for bear, arktos. The
reason is that the constellation of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, lies in the
northern sky. [ The Universe | English Words ] (source)

There is a giant supercluster of galaxies in the direction of the constellations

Perseus and Pegasus that is over a thousand million light-years long, and is the
largest supercluster known. In 1989, astronomers found another structure that
they dubbed the "Great Wall". It is a collection of galaxies some 500 million
light-years long, 200 million light-years wide, and 15 million light-years thick.

The star Betelgeuse, a bright star in the constellation of Orion, is estimated to

have a diameter of around 700 million miles. If it were placed at the centre of
our solar system, it would extend beyond the orbit of Jupiter.

Alpha Centauri, one of the stars in the system closest to the sun, is never visible
in the sky north of about 30° Northern Latitude. Though it is the third-brightest
star in the sky, it was not seen by the ancient Greeks nor the chief observatories
of the mediaeval Arabs at Cordoba, Baghdad, and Damascus, all located north
of the 30° line. (source)

Information about what has fallen into a black hole is stored on the event
horizon of a black hole. Recent calculations by the folks who study quantum
gravity theory and superstrings have confirmed what Stephen Hawking and his
collaborators proposed a decade or more ago. Evidently, the information
contained in matter that falls into a black hole is by some curious means
encoded in the pattern of frozen quantum fields at the horizon. This raises some
interesting possibilities that we could resurrect clocks, humans, spacecraft, and
whole planets into something like their pristine form if we could magically
reverse the in-fall and collapse process. Many believe that this mathematical
result means that we have reached a watershed moment in history in
understanding the connection between quantum mechanics and gravitation
theory. Quantum mechanics deals with statements about the information that
we can extract about a quantum mechanical process involving observation.
Now this same information language can be applied to configurations of the
gravitational field and space-time itself. [ The Universe | Physics and
Physicists ] (source)

For black holes, distant observers will see only the outside of the event horizon,
while individual observers falling into the black hole will experience quite
another "reality." General relativity predicts that for distant observers outside
the horizon, they will experience the three space-like coordinates and one time-
like coordinate, as they always have. For someone falling into a black hole and
crossing the horizon, this crossing is mathematically predicted to involve the
transformation of your single time-like coordinate into a space-like coordinate,
and your three space-like coordinates into three time-like coordinates. Along
any of these three former space-like coordinates, they now all terminate on the
singularity; you're experiencing them as time-like now. All choices always
terminate on the singularity—at least in the case of a non-rotating black hole.
The coordinate which used to measure external time now has a space-like
character which affords you some wiggle room, but dynamically, in terms of
these new reversed space and time coordinates, you find that no stable orbits
about the singularity are possible no matter what you try to do. Without any
stable orbits, and the inexorable freefall into the singularity, relativists often
refer to this as the collapse of space-time geometry. (source)

There is sound in space. What is sound? It is a pressure wave. So long as you

have some kind of gaseous medium, you will have the possibility of forming
pressure waves in it by "shocking" it in some way. In space, the interplanetary
medium is a very dilute gas at a density of about 10 atoms per cubic centimeter,
and the speed of sound in this medium is about 300 kilometers per second.
Typical disturbances due to solar storms and "magneto-sonic turbulence" at the
Earth's magnetopause have scales of hundreds of kilometers, so the acoustic
wavelengths are enormous. Human ears would never hear them, but we can
technologically detect these pressure changes and play them back for our ears
to hear by electronically compressing them. [ Physics and Physicists | The
Universe ] (source)

Most of the elements found in the human body originated in stars; we are
literally made of stardust. (source)

The Milky Way has a radius of about 50,000 light years. (source)

The oldest galaxies we can see are right next door to us in the present universe.
Looking out into space, we see images of galaxies that become younger and
younger the further out we look. We actually see images of the youngest
galaxies in the universe the farther out we look. (source)

If space is infinite, there is nothing on the other side. If space is finite because it
has been bent around upon itself because of gravity, then again there is nothing
on the other side of it because there is no seam. It looks like the surface of a
smooth ball which represents a piece of flat paper bent upon itself. (source)

The most distant galaxy ever observed is estimated to be around

13,000,000,000 light-years away. Discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope
in 2004, it is located behind the galactic cluster Abell 2218, which bends the
object's light. It is a small, energetic galaxy whose light that is seen on Earth
now would have set out when the universe was just 750 million years old. This
is the most distant object that can be observed consistently; some ephemeral
gamma-ray bursts have been observed that are slightly more distant than this
object. (source)

Brighter stars emit blue light, and cooler stars emit red light.

Last updated on October 4, 2009.

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