Fun Facts About Our Universe!
Some facts about the universe.
Earth is about 93 million miles from the sun. It takes about 8 minutes for the light from the sun to reach the earth.
It takes Pluto 248 years to orbit our sun. So obviously one year in Pluto time is 248 years our time. It’s distance from the sun is about 3.7 billion miles and it takes light from the sun about about 5 1/2 hours to reach the tiny frozen planet.
The largest known sun in our universe is VY Canis Majoris it’s diameter is 2.7 approximately billion kilometers. That’s about 1.7 billion miles. In comparison, our son is about 1.4 million miles in diameter. Here’s a photo to help grasp the difference in size.
The Universe is an estimated 13.7 billion years old.
Earth is about 4.5 billion years old.
There’s an estimated 100 billion galaxies in the known universe.
If light from the sun takes 8 minutes to reach us and we revolve around the sun because of it’s gravity pull on us. If the sun just went out. How long would it take for the effects of that to reach us? 8 minutes? Nope, the effect would be instantaneous. Gravity isn’t effected by limitations of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. (Nothing travels faster than the speed of light) That’s not exactly what he meant. Contrary to what everything seems to say on the web. the earth would notice the effects of gravity instantly and would continue it’s travel’s through space in a straight line.
We might live a few days, we might last a few months. It’s hard to say, in 8 minutes we would be cast in to darkness. Our atmosphere would leak out into space within a few months probably. But, even if it didn’t, storms would ravage earth as the oceans cooled and the land heated up. But, if somehow we could survive the superstorms, the dark, and the oceans freezing over the first few months. Maybe some of us could make it 6 months? Sorry, the past two paragraphs are not facts, just a hypothesis.
Think about this… We’ve known about other galaxies for hundreds of years. We’ve seen stars from them since the dawn of man. And, yet it wasn’t until 1992 that we found the first confirmed exoplanet (any planet outside of our solar system.) All those years of Star Trek, Star Wars, all the sci-fi movies of the 50 and 60’s and we had never found another planet in any solar system. However since 1992 we have now confirmed 843 of them, and we discover more and more each year. That was 20 years ago, imagine what we will know in another 20 years.
And just for fun, check out this video. I posted a similar one about a year or so ago, this one is a little different with fascinating info towards the end of the tour.
